TV Tuner Card and Multi-tasking Capabilities

[light blue marker]

Hello everyone,

I was looking into investing in a TV Tuner Card so that I did not need another television in my room. However, I want to play games while watching TV. My future set up will consist of 3 monitors. If I am watching TV on the monitor to the left, will my full screen game on the center monitor take a performance hit? Will watching TV slow down my PC to the point where I won't be able to do other things. It will be an i5 750 system (hopefully overclocked to above 3ghz), 4GB ram, and a 5850 video card.

Thanks

EDIT: Forgot to add: Or should I just buy an external tv tuner box? And what's a good tv tuner box?

 

[light blue marker]

Happy New Years! Just checking in and appears no one has any experience with tv tuner cards. Or everyone was getting drunk new years eve.

Anyway, I still can't decide because I don't know the impact of internal tv tuner cards while playing games, chatting, and browsing. If in the end no one still knows, I will just be buying a kworld tv tuner box to hook up to the dvi port on my monitor. Here was the one I was going to get:

KWORLD External ATSC/QAM TVBox HDMI Edition SA295-Q DE DVI Interface - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815260027

 

[mountaindew2k]

Windows media center does consume a fair amount of system resources and it can impact the performance of graphics intense games.
I have a core I7 860 with 8gb memory
win 7 64 bit prof.
80 gb intel g2 ssd
2x asus engtx 260 gfx cards sli
asus dual digital tv tuner connected to 2 ea comcast set top boxes for recording and watching tv at same time.
I use dual 22" lcd monitors in 1680x1050 res
I can run all software and watch/record tv with no performance problems.
The only game I play is supreme commander and it also performs fine with tv/media center and the dozen other programs I run and use at the same time!

Hope this gives you an idea of how your system will perform!

 

[leon2006]

The best HDTV tuner to date is hauppage 2250. I use it as PVR/DVR using its proprietary software or windows media center. This tuner process the TV task on its hardware so its less dependent on the CPU/GPU.

Yes you can play HDTV and play games at the same time... When Windows Media Center is on Live TV Mode CPU utilization is ~ 12% and GPU activity is at 8%... There are a lot of resources left to play games. You play game on the primary monitor and windows media center on the secondary monitor.

Windows media center takes very little resources when playing HDTV with 2250.

I have use this HDTV Tuner for Vista-64 and XP(> 1 year).... I don't expect issues on W7 but i can't say for sure since i have not tried it on W7.

See path below

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116036

 

[mountaindew2k]

The best HDTV tuner to date is hauppage 2250. I use it as PVR/DVR using its proprietary software or windows media center. This tuner process the TV task on its hardware so its less dependent on the CPU/GPU.

Yes you can play HDTV and play games at the same time... When Windows Media Center is on Live TV Mode CPU utilization is ~ 12% and GPU activity is at 8%... There are a lot of resources left to play games. You play game on the primary monitor and windows media center on the secondary monitor.

Windows media center takes very little resources when playing HDTV with 2250.

I have use this HDTV Tuner for Vista-64 and XP(> 1 year).... I don't expect issues on W7 but i can't say for sure since i have not tried it on W7.

See path below

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116036

Windows media center does consume 233,620 k of memory on my win 7 system.
My comment was more about system resources "memory" not cpu, gpu and video engine load.
Sorry for confusion, that was what I was trying to convey.