Beyond TV 3.5 & PCI-Express Options

[alundi]

Greetings:

I'm piecing together a PC based PVR and intend to use Beyond TV 3.5. Before purchasing the hardware, I was trying to gain additional information on which route to go with a system that uses a PCI-Express slot.

With this in mind, can anyone offer any information or experiences on using Beyond TV 3.5 with a dedicated PCI-Express video controller (e.g., ATI FireGL V3100) and dedicated TV-Tuner Controller (e.g., the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350) combination compared to a single card PCI-Express solution that provide full video out, MPEG Hardware Encoder/Decoder support and TV Tuner, such as the ATI All-In-Wonder RADEON X600 PRO?

The only advantage I see with going with the first option of a dedicated PCI-Express Video Controller and a separate TV Tuner card is that I can later add a second TV Tuner card for additional recording and playback options.

Any thoughts, experiences, and information on this topic would be very much appreciated.

Best Regards...

[DonK]

Your configuration options aren't really any different then someone using an AGP based system.

Personally, I would recommend you avoid software based cards, Hardware based cards (Hauppauge cards, for example) will provide you with a much better experience.

[CollinR]

ATI is the devil!

Go GForce and don't look back, they won't bundle in software that doesn't work.

I will only differ from Don in saying that many PCI-E mainboards offer a limited number of standard PCI slots therefore you are limited on the number of tuners you can run. This can also be combined if they put the PCI-E x16 (video card slot) in the normal #1 PCI slot, this all but forces you to have a tuner right next to the GPU unless you only run one or two tuners.

[RobertH]

one of the issues of early adoption is that your not going to find a pci-e just about anything right now, the only thing your going to find are graphics cards and things like raid controllers.

from experience you dont want anything that is a combo graphics / tv tuner card especially an all in wonder, i would definately agree with colin ati all in wonder cards are plain crap. Do yourself a favor and if you definately need to early adopt wich is almost pointles anyway because the atx form factor will be phased out in the next 2 years anyway in favor of btx. just make sure you get a board that has as many regular pci slots as you want tuners, if you cant get a board with that many your going to end up needing to use external USB2.0 hardware encoders.

personal opinion, upgrading to something that runs pci-e is pointless, the current boards only come with 1x and 16x connectors and there arent any 1x devices for the most part right now and there probably wont be too many pci-e devices for a while. Your going to end up spending a lot of money just to early adopt something, just get a regular atx motherboard with agp and use a decent 8x agp card.

[CollinR]

I've got an:

ASUS "P5AD2 Premium"
925X Chipset Motherboard

LGA 775 CPU 2.8Ghz

1GB of crucial DDR2 600

ASUS nVIDIA GeForce 6600 Video Card
128MB DDR, 128-Bit,
DVI/TV-Out, PCI-Express,
Model "EN6600/TD/128" -RETAIL
Overclocked to 3.1 ghz about 645mhz on the RAM.

I couldn't be happier but I also can't disagree that bein on the bleeding edge of technology is a good practice either.