HTPC - TV Tuner Reviews

More Platform Comparisons

I will admit to being more familiar with the NVIDIA drivers, but I generally don't mind ATI cards or their drivers. In this case, however, I definitely feel that ATI needs to make some improvements and offer more flexibility and ease of use for connecting HDTVs. Since ATI's DVI port had problems, we looked at another option: using component-out cables instead of the DVI connection. The good news is that using component-out gets rid of the display problems; you can change inputs on the TV without the ATI drivers losing knowledge of the TV, and you can reboot and have it keep your settings. However, using the component cables in combination with certain TV tuner cards presents problems. (We'll say more on that later.)

We're using a slightly older ATI card, and it's possible that the new X1xxx cards will handle HDTVs via DVI better. It seems like a few changes to the drivers are all that's really needed to correct these issues, which is what we'd really like to see. I should also note that ATI has improved their HDTV support since I first tried connecting my HDTV to this X800 Pro back in February. When I connected the TV using the DVI port back then, I was limited to one specific resolution: 1080i, with no adjustments for overscan. While the Toshiba 46H84 is in fact a 1080i display - or really a 1920x540p display, if I understand it correctly - the picture generally looks more pleasing when using 720p output. Particularly when connected to a PC, the interlacing causes headache-inducing jitter (at least when using Windows; as mentioned, 1080i looks great for viewing videos).

In the process of switching from the Sempron system to the HP, the new Catalyst 5.11 drivers were installed. (We used both the CP and CCC versions, and decided to go with the CCC drivers.) Oddly enough, the experience of using the Xpress 200 IGP on the HP computer doesn't have quite the same behavior as the X800 Pro. Component output is no longer an option on the HP system, but the DVI port doesn't lose knowledge of the TV when changing inputs. The resolution still gets reset to 848x480 every time that the PC is rebooted, but that's easier to deal with than a blank display. The X800 Pro still has the same issues with using the DVI port, unfortunately, even with the latest drivers. Hopefully, ATI will make some further refinements to their drivers so that these concerns become a non-issue in the future.

Besides the difference in DVI port behavior, running an HDTV off of a cheap IGP is definitely an interesting option, particularly for HTPC builders. Unless you're planning on running games, you really don't want or need a hot, power-hungry GPU inside your case if you can avoid it. A system with a low power CPU like the Pentium M (or a mobile Athlon or some other cooler chip) could help quite a bit in making a cool and quiet HTPC. We plan to try out a board with the NVIDIA 61xx IGP in the near future and make sure that it works as well as their discrete cards for HTPCs.

One last point is that while we'd give the HTPC edge to NVIDIA right now, they're certainly not perfect. First, quite a few NVIDIA cards do not come with component out connections, which some people might find important. (Many of ATI's old R3xx cards include component out as a feature; for example, a 9800 Pro that I have behaves almost exactly like the X800 Pro.) Second, when you first start up the PC and load Windows, you need to have the TV input on the DVI port, or the NVIDIA cards default to 640x480 resolution. (We've used a 6800GT and a 7800GTX, with the same behavior.) These are minor issues, and either is preferable to failing to detect the display at all (like ATI cards), but they bear mention nonetheless.

The final conclusion on platform choices is to be aware of the idiosyncrasies of each. In my experience, the DVI port is preferred for NVIDIA, and the component out connections are better with ATI. With the platform considerations out of the way, here are the actual TV cards.