Benefits of a Hauppage PVR250 on an already quiet PC?

R

Regulus

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 24, 2004
Messages
96
So I found a semi-old Dell P4 1.8ghz, and its extremely quiet, I can't hear it at all unless I put my ear next to it, so noise isn't an issue at all. It's a big bulky PC case, but this isn't being used as a conventional HTPC anyways, so it doesn't matter.

Anyways, what are the benefits of shelling out $130 for a Hauppage PVR250 rather than a cheap $30 generic tuner card on ebay? I know that the Hauppage has a built in proccessor that takes strain off the CPU to make it quieter, but I don't really care much about that... Is there any other reason to get the expensive one?
 
it doesnt make it quiet, it makes it not process as much which would build up heat not noise. The Hauppage would also allow instant rewind as opposed to having to record stuff then saving and looking back later.
 
Cheap tuner card: Software encoding meaning that it uses your system to encode the video and depending on what quality setting you want to use it could end up taking alot of CPU to do so dumping alot of heat into your case since it's running near load nearly all the time. ;)

Real PVR card: Hardware encoding meaning that it has a dedicated MPEG2 chip on it that encodes the video into whatever quality setting you want and takes nothing more then 5% of the CPU (if even that much).

BTW if your not going to use Linux theres no reason to get a PVR250. Save the cash and get the PVR150 which does have (slightly) better image quality and cost cheaper (since it's easier for them to make).
 
CrimandEvil said:
BTW if your not going to use Linux theres no reason to get a PVR250. Save the cash and get the PVR150 which does have (slightly) better image quality and cost cheaper (since it's easier for them to make).
Click to expand...
Thanks for the help guys. I am going to be using Linux for this, I'm getting the box set up right now.

I'll go ahead and order the 250 from newegg :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top