TV Tuner Comparisons
How does the NVIDIA DualTV MCE compare with the ATI Theater 550 Pro and All-In-Wonder series of cards? We'll start with power consumption, and we tested each of the three cards at three different states: while the system is idle, while watching live TV, and while recording live TV. Here are the results.| System Power Draw | |||
| Idle | Watching TV | Recording TV | |
| NVIDIA DualTV MCE | 162 | 179 | 189 |
| ATI MSI Theater 550 Pro | 159 | 170 | 175 |
| ATI X1800 AIW | 154 | 172 | 172 |
For reference, the power draw of the system without a TV tuner card installed (excluding the AIW) is 145 Watts. We used an X1800 GTO for the main graphics card with the DualTV and Theater 550 cards, in order to keep the power draws as close as possible to that of the AIW card. We can see from the table that the Theater 550 and AIW draw less power than the DualTV while watching and recording live TV, which makes sense given the DualTV's ability to record two sources as opposed to the other cards' one.
Something else we're interested in looking at is channel switching speed between these three cards, as this is something that can vary between different TV tuner cards. The type of tuner on the card can affect this, and all three of these cards use silicone tuners, which can be slower than analog ones, but take up less space on the board. Interestingly, we found that the AIW had the fastest channel switch time at about one second. The Theater 550 had the slowest channel switch time at about three seconds, and the DualTV MCE was slightly faster than the Theater 550 at about 2 and a half seconds. While three seconds doesn't sound like a very long time at all, it can be a very annoying delay if you like channel surfing.
Between these three TV Tuners, there are some major differences aside from power and channel switching speed. Of course the AIW is a much different solution than the other two in that it is a complete 3D graphics card with a built-in TV tuner. The DualTV and Theater 550 are stand alone TV tuners meant to operate alongside a separate graphics card. Having a graphics card and TV Tuner combined can be good or bad, depending on the personal preference. Some people would rather have the freedom of being able to switch graphics cards while keeping the same TV tuner, while others may prefer the combination of the two in order to keep the extra PCI/PCI-E slot open.
Note that the Theater 550 is available in both PCI and PCI-E X1 versions; at present, it is the only PCI-E TV tuner on the market. Also, the X1800 AIW is a very large part and wouldn't fit very well in a compact system, though to be fair ATI offers AIW cards in a wide range of performance and size. One more thing to note about the AIW cards is that they don't have MPEG-2 encoding in hardware, which means they won't work with Windows MCE. The Theater 550 Pro and NVIDIA DualTV include this feature and work fine with MCE 2005.
The Theater 550 Pro is much more similar to the DualTV MCE, with the major difference being the ability to only record one source as opposed to the DualTV's two. Coupled with Windows MCE, the DualTV's capabilities and ease-of-use outweigh those offered by the Theater 550 Pro and it's included PowerCinema 3 (or 4, depending on which T550 card you purchase) software, but the fact that the DualTV MCE doesn't include any other software is a problem.
Below are some screenshot captures of each of these cards' live video for image quality comparison.
NVIDIA DualTV
ATI Theater 550 Pro
ATI X1800 AIW
We can see that there doesn't seem to be much difference between the quality of the DualTV MCE and the Theater 550 Pro, but with the AIW, the image looks a little sharper than the others. This is especially noticeable in the writing on two of the images. Overall though, the differences aren't that great and all of these cards provide good quality video with live TV. Unfortunately, HDTV isn't supported for any of you that want that feature, but of course the number of HD broadcasts and channels is still significantly lower than the number of standard analog channels.
A simple screenshot doesn't always convey quality as well as a video, so we have also created a BitTorrent share with video samples from the three cards. Download the torrent file, and then use your favorite BitTorrent client. Total size of the videos files is 22.3MB. Note that we have the original MCE generated file for the DualTV as well as a high quality re-encode to standard MPEG-2. (The DVR-MS extension doesn't work with all video players, but it works with WMP10.)
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
68 Comments
View All Comments
hondaman - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
FIRST thing I thought. Pretty bad review by AT standards.How does live tv look compared to REAL live tv, i.e. tv plugged right into your sat/cable reciever?
Where is the defacto standard for tv capture cards, the hauppauge? Why is this card not compared?
Will it run in linux based pvrs, and what are the tradeoffs? Is there any windows-only software that makes this card better, and isnt available for linux users, thus making it a bad choice for us?
Need WAY WAY WAY more info! Come on AT! You can do better than this!
stmok - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
Knowing how Nvidia acts in regards to open-source in general, I seriously doubt this solution works in Linux. You're better off getting a Hauppauge card that is well known for Linux support.As for the article itself? (I'd have to agree with the others).
(1) Where the heck is CPU usage graphs?
(2) It would be wiser if you capture from the same show with the different cards, so we can compare quality.
(3) How does it compare to those Haupauge products?
(4) Support for other OSs? (We ain't all Windows users!)
(5) I am curious of the power consumption of capture cards...How much power do they burn?
micsaund - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
Also: "...all three of these cards use silicone tuners..."It's "silicon" -- silicone is used in completely different applications, some of which I'm sure I don't have to elaborate on ;)
guste - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
I'm a bit disappointed as well, but not surprised. Anandtech has it's strong areas and weak areas and this is definitely one of the weaker areas. Not a big knock against the site though, as this kind of thing isn't it's bread and butter.Anyway, I was hoping to get some more data, since I currently run two Theatre 550 Pros in my MCE box and wanted to see what the CPU utilization characteristics of the nVidia dual tuner solution are. The 550 Pros are a flawless solution, other than the fact that they take two slots, so it would have helped to get a thorough review to see if it was worth it to upgrade.
DukeTogo - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
Ditto, I wanted to like this article but...I thought it was over the top to jump on the 550 cards for only have one tuner.
As noted, not a problem - install two. We run 2 x Sapphire Theatrix 550's and they are great. If you can get the "Lite version" (ie. no remote) it's extra savings over the one with the IR remote or the ATI Elite version with the RF remote. Then you just use your MCE remote, assuming you use MCE.
I was interested in the power consumption. Subtracting off the 145W base, it seems that each config uses: (warning: validity?) I doubled the 550 solution for the case where one uses two cards.
From the article (-145W)
Idle Watch Record
NVIDIA 17 34 44
550 14 25 30
550x2 28? 50? 60?
I do own a PowerAngel so I could probably validate the 550 figures given the time on the weekend.
I'd be interested in heat output as well. Does one Nvidia card produce less heat than 2 550's ? I would assume so, but...
The channel change times was interesting, though not perhaps all that relevant if you use an IR blaster to an external set-top box. Probably only matters to those with a direct cable feed?
I'd also be very interested in an analysis of MediaSqueeze.
cpu? disk space? quality? interface/settings ? etc
Hoping to see a Part II for this article with some of the info people want to see.
mindless1 - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
Something looks wrong with those numbers, a card that doesn't have MPEG2 encoding should cause a larger difference between idle (watching) and recording because it's taking the CPU out of HALT state quite a bit.Trisped - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
That would only be true if the card was compressing the data stream so it could be sent to the video card to be decompressed. With an AIW card the data is sent strait from the tuner to the GPU, and never has to leave the board. Otherwise they would have built in a converter so it wouldn't cripple your system bus when sending the data between cards.mindless1 - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
No, it would be true.IF the card does not have hardware compression, AND the video is being recorded to a compressed format, THEN the CPU _MUST_ being encountering a higher load than it otherwise would. So it is with most AIW, software MPEG2 is the default isn't it? regardless of what the default is, I think wek can presume the majority of AIW users are using a compressed format.