ATI AIW 9800 Pro + 2nd PCI video card or ATI TV Wonder Pro + ATI 9800 Pro?

[Stealth1024]

Neglecting price difference here this boils down to: does the AIW card have advantages over a seperate TV tuner?

Assuming I need at least two monitor outputs (which the AIW card doesn't have, thus the need for a second card), under either of these situations, could the TV image be moved from the primary monitor to the secondary monitor? Are there video capturing advantages to having the AIW with the TV tuner on the AGP bus? What about quality of the image, etc.

I was just reading this review: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTc2LDEy but it really didn't answer any of these questions...

Thank you

 

[Glorfindael]

I liked my 9700 Pro AIW, i would stick with the aiw, and u can get 2 monitor outputs using the aux. output, u jus need an adapter.

 

[seepy83]

on a similar note, are the pci tuners just as good as what you would get out of a AIW 9800? the thinking here being that if you buy a 9800pro and TV Tuner, in the future you could save money buy not buying a AIW card because you have a pci tuner.

 

[Stealth1024]

Originally posted by: seepy83
on a similar note, are the pci tuners just as good as what you would get out of a AIW 9800? the thinking here being that if you buy a 9800pro and TV Tuner, in the future you could save money buy not buying a AIW card because you have a pci tuner.

Good point.

 

[rbV5]

on a similar note, are the pci tuners just as good as what you would get out of a AIW 9800?

Since the AIW 9800 use the GPU in consort with the tuner and Theater 200 chip it has a feature set that no PCI tuner can match. Hardware assisted MPEG 1/2 encoding/decoding, excellent MPEG-4 compression, emerging network video sharing support, real-time hardware filtering support, AGP bandwidth capture, 12 bit ADC's, native component output and a great multimedia suite as well as the Pinnacle software and an FM remote rather than IR are hard to beat. Not perfect, but definately great.

AIW cards are generally a cheaper solution, have better driver support, better feature set, and hold their value much longer than their seperate component counter parts.