Which TV Card do you recommend?

[Ice_Black]

Which TV Card do you recommend from PC World or Scan?

I will be watching on my PC, not for the TV.

It should have Ariel port (DVB-T) to watch freeview channels.. the quality must be excellent and excellent recording.


Budget £50 to £60

I will use third party software, maybe dvbviewer

[mac124]

I have a terratec cinergy 2400i and can recommend that. Dual DVB tuners, remote and reciever included, should come in under buget too but not sure if you can get it from those suppliers.

http://www.terratec.net/en/products/...i_DT_1588.html

[Ice_Black]

I have a terratec cinergy 2400i and can recommend that. Dual DVB tuners, remote and reciever included, should come in under buget too but not sure if you can get it from those suppliers.

http://www.terratec.net/en/products/...i_DT_1588.html

Thanks.

How would you compare that with Hauppauge Nova-T 500 ? and which is better

[CX23882-19]

I've used the Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT and it is a great card, --at first--, but the failure rate is too high and support is poor. I ended up RMA'ing my cards (yes, plural) after tuner failures (gradual degradation of Tuner 2's sensitivity) and sold the replacements on eBay. I'm not alone in this problem. If you can read German there are some sites that make interesting reading.

The Hauppauge Nova-T-500 has current drivers, for XP, Vista, Windows 7 (and Linux) and an active support forum which will work through fixes. Personally speaking, I've had driver bugs and software bugs resolved after reporting them to Hauppauge. Terratec on the other hand couldn't be bothered to respond to my emails.

Hauppauge cards might give the impression of being more problematic, but that's only because they're more open than some other companies, and their forums don't try to cover up problems, and of course because of the popularity.

Go for the Hauppauge card and you won't be disappointed. It works great in DVBViewer - I'm using a DVBViewer Recording Service back-end server running a combination of Hauppauge Nova-S, Nova-T-500 and HVR-900 tuners and it never lets me down. The Cinergy 2400i also had issues with DVBViewer whereby it would refuse to lock onto a channel, and just sit for hours retrying to tune whilst the program was missed. Never had this with the Nova-T-500.

[mac124]

Hmm odd had mine for a while now (well over a year) and not had any issues whatsoever. Maybe i was one of the lucky ones.

[CX23882-19]

I must admit that I was disappointed when the cards began to deteriorate, because when they worked they worked great. I suspect that it is a heat issue, because the second tuner is sandwiched between the first one (outer tuner which the coax feed connects directly into) and the motherboard. My first two cards were installed in a pair (giving 4 tuners), so when the first one died I decided to run the other one by itself, with an empty PCIe slot on the upper side of it, and 2 empty PCI slots below it. Within 6 months it too had developed exactly the same fault.

I then bought a third one and installed it by itself. Again, something like 3 months later it was beginning to deteriorate. Early symptoms were problems locking onto some of the weaker frequencies, or locking but producing garbage. This one was actually the worst out of the three (in spite of being used in more favourable conditions) in that the second tuner became insensitive to anything but the strongest signal.

I suspect that it is a failure of the Thomson tuners rather than something that could be attributed to Terratec. Perhaps I'm to blame, but I don't see how I could keep the cards any cooler.

[mac124]

You may be right my HTPC's have always been in larger cases so airflow was quite good and being pcie were well away from other hardware, sound card and gfx cards so....? Strange though they do seem to be very good, when they work