High definition TV PC cards signal rise in quality

TV tuners are even bigger business this year at Computex, and there is a definite buzz around the whole PC at the centre of the digital home concept.

Many companies are pushing USB tuners, which are not only cheap, but also considered more flexible than internal cards. But we are also seeing high definition ready graphics cards on display.

Among those based around graphics cards are examples from Powercolor and Gecube.

Powercolor’s (often known under parent brand Tul) is an X1600 Pro HDMI. The low profile card will be released first in Japan, and appear in the UK at the back end of the year.

It has 500MHz core clock speed and 256MB of GDDR3 memory, the high definition card is HDCP (high definition content protection) compliant, and should cost only about $20 more than an ordinary X1600 Pro card (typically around $109).

It is also coming out with the Theater 650 Pro TV tuner card, again based around ATI’s graphics processing unit. Another low profile card, they will support both digital and analogue signals and slot into either a PCI or PCI-Express x1 socket. The Theater 650 Pro will come out in July.

Powecolor marketing manager Raymen Wu, expected a surge of interest in HD internal TV tuners as more people become comfortable using their PC to watch and record TV programmes.

Gecube’s TV card is a very similar specification to Powercolor’s. The $169 X1600 SilenCool Series (sic) is again an HD PCI Express card and support signals up to a resolution of 1080i. It uses four heat pipes and is based around the 90nm RV530XT.

It has S/PDIF in for digital audio and uses S-video out via the same socket, using a dongle to covert between the two connections. It means that if a user does not own an HD TV, they can instead use S-video for the best possible picture quality.

The quiet, passively cooled card also some out in July, and although again low profile, because there is no fan its heat sink means the card is far longer than is usual, so will take up more space in the case. An updated version, using the smaller 80nm RV535 comes out one month later and is expected to cost around $249.

A shorter version using a fan is also coming out, but this is based around the slower X1300 graphics.