Our Test System

We worked with a modified version of a test system we put together for another recent media PC story (System Builder Marathon (Media PCs) : Day 1). All the components were the same, except we used an MSI 7600 GT graphics card, switched out the DDR2 533 memory modules for DDR2 1066, and used an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU. Of course, we also removed the Avermedia A180 HDTV tuner card, as well as the Hauppauge PVR 150 NTSC tuner card that had hitherto graced this system. For that reason we also dropped the PC Alchemy MCE bundle and opted to buy MCE 2005 by itself (OEM version) and bought the MCE wireless keyboard/MCE remote bundle instead. The full complement of gear is described in the following table ; it came to a total price of €944 (£640).

Those interested in specifics on the motherboard we used will find them lovingly recounted in tabular form in the section entitled A Closer Look at the Asus M2A-VM HDMI in the same aforementioned story. There you can also read information about most system hardware and drivers - note, however, that we did switch to Nvidia driver 6.14.10.9131 aka 91.31, to match with the MSI 7600GT card.

How And What We Tested

When it comes to putting a TV tuner and capture card through its paces, options for both analog and digital signal handling are somewhat limited. We worked with analog TV purely through our cable service (Time Warner) to get a sense of how well the card handled incoming signals, and how able it was to deal with noise. We compared the signal as it appeared on our HDTV set (a Sony KDL-46XB3 46" LCD model) using signals straight from the cable box into the set, versus signals routed through the M780 for playback, or recorded using the M780’s capture capabilities and played back later.