help me pick a TV tuner card

[FastRedPonyCar]

My brother is going off to college and my dad is commissioning me to find him a PCI card to use to watch TV on.

His system is a fairly run of the mill AMD 939 system with an old DFI lanboy 939 mobo 1 gig of ram and a an EVGA 8800 GTS video card.

I'm basically looking for a card that he can plug in his cable TV connection from the wall or cable box (hd cable as well) and watch TV on his computer monitor as there isn't any room in his room to fit a TV (that and this is a more cost effective solution since he has a 22" widescreen monitor.

I see several ATI cards that I know do TV but I need one that won't screw with the 8800 when he plays games and I'm not looking for the most expensive one either. Something that's decent and can give him the HD cable signal on his pc.

And if the all in wonder HD is the only card that can actually do HD cable, what's the next step down that would suffice and maybe not necessarily do HD. Becuase in all honesty, they've got a 48" LCD in the living room he can use for real HD. I figured if there's a card that's not too expensive that can put HD on his pc screen, it may be worth checking out but I see the all in wonder HD's for like $200 and that's out of what he wants to pay.


Thanks guys!

[Stoneyguy]

Alot of cards out there can only play OTA HDTV and analog cable. I havn't looked around for one in months so maybe that's changed. That's what prevented me from buying one.

[FastRedPonyCar]

What about this one for just basic cable TV?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814122180

[Stoneyguy]

Don't know your budget, but this Asus one (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815293002) looks fairly solid.

[nekrosoft13]

What about this one for just basic cable TV?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814122180

i actually have that one in my "family" pc.

amd 4200x2
asus nforce4 based board
2gb ddr
geforce6200
vista64

card works well, no complains.

[Heinz68]

I have the ATI TV Wonder 650 PCIe and had no problem to use it with 8800 GTX.
When I bought it was not ready for 64bit OS, don't know if anything changed since than.

I don't have cable and use the card only for over the air HD.
The card has analog tuner which I don't use. The card has also settings for cable and depending on your cable company it will carry Clear-QAM unscrambled digital TV over cable.

Here Directly from ATI (http://ati.amd.com/products/tvwonder650/pcie/index.html)
Two built-in tuners offering combo tuning for:

* Over-the-air Digital TV / HDTV1 (ATSC)
* Over-the-air / Cable Analog TV (NTSC)
* Clear-QAM (unscrambled) Digital HD Cable(2)
* FM Radio

2 Clear-QAM is unscrambled digital TV over cable. Digital TV channel support is dependent upon your local cable provider. Please contact your cable provider for a listing of digital channels supported in your area. Clear-QAM is supported in Windows Vista® using ATI Catalyst Media Center™.

ATI was also first introducing PC Cable Card, by now I believe some other companies have one. The problem was, due to the cable companies restrictions it was available only on pre-built PC boxes.
I used to read a lot about it at AVScience Forum (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=934453) but for the last few months I did not follow up on it.

Good place to choose HDTV Tuner that suits your needs the best is at HDTVtunerinfo.com (http://www.hdtvtunerinfo.com/comparetuners.html).
Looks to me some of the Aver tuners are the most recommended.
I did choose the ATI TV Wonder 650 PCIe mainly because, before this I had for many years the ATI analog TV Tuner and never had any problems using it with NVIDIA cards.

[Blacklash]

I got this little avermedia usb tuner.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815100035

Works fine under Vista x64 with the media center. If you want to tune QAM you need to use their software to do it.

[Tr1cK]

Don't get Avermedia. I bought one about 2 years ago that had remote and everything. For some reason, they have quit updating drivers for it and have it as a discontinued product with no support. It's worthless to me now unless I put it in a XP box.