Where do I find good TV Tuners?!

Hey everyone,

I'm a complete idiot regarding TV Tuner cards, I've been wanting to get one so I can throw my TV out of my room. First of all, I have spent a little over 2 hours on Newegg.com looking for TV tuner cards with relatively high ratings. Truthfully, it isn't promising, half of the cards have 50% 5 star ratings.

Does anyone know of any good cards?

I am using Vista Ultimate 64-bit, therefore, the damn card needs to work with the OS.

Other than it's compability with Vista x64, I would like it to be an actual card, I want the thing INSIDE my case, it can be PCI, or PCI-E.


** I doubt that this is possible, but is there any card that has nearly no response time? I would like to be able to plug a gaming console on it. If we're looking hardware wise, it works, but I suspect the response time for these things to be around 1-2 seconds, thus no great for interacting with the frames.


One more thing, as of right now, I haven't really established a budget for this thing, it really depends on quality.

Thanks for the help.

I use the ATI TV Wonder 650. It has a clear picture and works with Vista X64 Media Center.


You can get it in PCI or PCIe 1x. VisionTek makes the PCIe version. Just make sure it is the TV Wonder 650 chip on the tuner.

1Haplo

i'm very happy w/my Hauppauge 1600. tv/cable/HDTV tuner. it works with Vista Ultimate 64 bit. Just built another one this weekend. If you are using the windows media center, the drivers and whatnot will update right with your windows updates.

you didnt really say wether you are using Over-the-air tv, cable, directv, over-the-air HDTV, or what... but this card covers it all.

not sure about plugging a console into it, i'm strictly PC gaming... so not sure how they hook up.

BIG plus to look for is the Hardware Decoding on the card.

am sure you'll get a number of responses, with other great cards too.