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ATI HDTV Wonder vs. Dvico FusionHDTV5 Gold Plus

C

creedawg

Senior member
I am ready to buy either one of these cards, but I need to know the differeneces among the two. Yes understand the HDTV wonder is an OTA card, while the Fusion5 is QAM. However, how about pic quality? How about local channels? How good is reception of both? Is it true that the Fusion5 does not require an indoor/outdoor antenna? Please let me know of the differences...

Thanks!

Cree
 
get a myHD TV card, It sounds like you're going to use Windows XP Pro instead of Windows MCE 2005, which is good for your situation because the QAM card does not work with MCE 2005. The real difference is one card is over the air uses a software encoder (ATI) and one card uses a hardware encoder (myHD, not sure about the one you're talking about but presumably) and allows you to recieve signals from your cable box in your house (better reception but some signals might be blocked)
 
the card he's talking about is better than a myHD card, it uses the best hd chipset avi. atm the LG 5th gen one, I would go w/ the divco card, my dad just got one recently for his PVR PC and it's been great.

EDIT: also as a note you will need an external antena with both cards for OTA hdtv or a cable signal w/ hd for the divco card.
 
Here is some product info on the Fusion5

http://www.fusionhdtv.co.kr/Eng/products/
http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video/fusion5.asp

Thanks for the suggestion on the myHD. However, I am concerned more about recepition. Yes I will be using Windows XP Pro instead of MCE 2005. My twin brother
has the Fusion3 card and the results are really good. Running it off a P4 1.8, with a Radeon 9600SE. Has some studdering issues sometimes, but is solid noneoftheless.
The question is that, do I need an antenna with the Fusion5?

Cree
 
Arcanedeath, thanks for your comments. Yes my twins Fusion3 card looks great! If he had a faster processor (i.e. P4 2.5-3 Ghz) his results would be better.

Cree
 
Off these two cards which has better picture quality and less studer? I am looking for
nice OTA and regular NTSC pic quality with less jitter...

Cree
 
The card that would perform best would be the card with a HDTV hardware decoder chip.

From the posts it appears as though the ATI has a software decoder while the Fusion has a hardware HDTV decoder.

The hardware decoder will take the processing of the HDTV signal off of the CPU and will therefore run more smoothly and with less resources.

And the picture quality will be equal (assuming that the ATI has enough CPU power to run it smoothly) because the HDTV signal is digital and not analog.

The reason you notice a difference between standard TV tuners is because they have different algorithms to minize interferance & noise that has combined with the analog signal. The better algorithms make the picture look better.

With HDTV (digital) you do not have these issues and therefore the picture quality will be a direct result of the HDTV or SDTV broadcast you are watching and not the card.
 
Thanks for you input. From what I hear the ATI uses less CPU, but I thought that the Fusion required a more powerful CPU to
run the card because it relies soley on the CPU. I could be wrong tho!

Cree
 
I am very close on buying the Fusion5. Is this a good buy? I just want to plug this into regular cable without an antenna and get free HDTV. Is this possible?

Cree
 
The Fusion 5 does not have a hardware decoder, but this is usually not necessary unless you have a slow computer. My brother is running his on an Athlon XP at 2.1GHz or so with a Radeon 9700 Pro. I think he has 768MB of RAM, and got a little stuttering before he remembered to turn on dual-channel memory.

I have the MyHD MDP-130 myself (plus the DVI daughtercard) and I love it. Very very low CPU usage (hardware decoder), QAM, everything you'd expect in a tuner. However, many will be put off by its rather high price. I think it's worth it if you want to spend the money though. But for "general" use, the Fusion 5 should be good. It supports QAM so you should get your local HD/digital channels over cable, as they're almost always sent unencrypted (you will not get premium/non-free channels like TNT-HD, ESPN-HD, HBO-HD, etc.).

Feel free to ask if you have any more specific questions about HDTV tuners, I tend to give a lot of people advice on them 😛

Edit: As long as you're getting a stable, solid signal, picture quality will be identical for all practical purposes. HDTV tuners are not like analog tuners in that they can vary in picture quality. The $99 Fusion 5 Lite will get you the same picture that my MyHD card does, assuming your computer is fast enough. DVICO has trial software and transport stream samples on their website that you can download to gauge the performance of HDTV playback on your computer; I would suggest downloading those just to make sure it'll run fine on your computer.

Edit 2: Read some of the previous posts and saw you were talking about analog NTSC picture quality too. 😛 From what I've seen of my brother's tuner, analog is fine on the Fusion.
 
Thanks for your advice! These were the answers I was looking for. Man you are knowledgeable in this area! Yes I am interested also in regular broadcast as well. So if I use
the Fusion5 would I have the ability to receive non HD channels? As far as HBO, my regular cable has free HBO. I am not worried if it can be broadcasted in HD.

The final question is do I need to use an antenna? I hope not....

Cree
 
Originally posted by: creedawg
Thanks for your advice! These were the answers I was looking for. Man you are knowledgeable in this area! Yes I am interested also in regular broadcast as well. So if I use
the Fusion5 would I have the ability to receive non HD channels? As far as HBO, my regular cable has free HBO. I am not worried if it can be broadcasted in HD.

The final question is do I need to use an antenna? I hope not....

Cree
Click to expand...

Yes, the Fusion 5 can receive regular analog broadcasts just fine too. You don't need an antenna since it has QAM cable support - you'll get all your analog channels over cable, plus whatever digital/HD channels the cable company leaves unencrypted (which as I said, are almost always limited to the local channels). 🙂
 
Cool! Thanks so much! What is the biggest difference btw the MDP130 vs. Fusion5? Is it worth the price difference? Also the ATI HDTV Wonder. I heard that this is a poor HD card and the Fusion is the better buy...Your thoughts!

Cree
 
Originally posted by: creedawg
Cool! Thanks so much! What is the biggest difference btw the MDP130 vs. Fusion5? Is it worth the price difference? Also the ATI HDTV Wonder. I heard that this is a poor HD card and the Fusion is the better buy...Your thoughts!

Cree
Click to expand...

The main difference is that the MDP-130 has a hardware decoder (=low CPU usage, work offloaded onto the card), while the Fusion 5 relies on the CPU for decoding. As I mentioned, this is not normally a problem for any reasonably recent computer (although I would recommend that you try out the software and samples from DVICO's website just to make sure).

The ATI HDTV Wonder is decent, I suppose...but I've heard of lots of software problems. And not trivial ones either - stuff like the card not working at all unless you install stuff in a very specific order, and then still sometimes not working anyway. In addition to that (they may have improved the software lately, I can't really say because I haven't looked into it) - the ATI card only supports OTA and no QAM cable. It does come with an antenna, but you'll be very limited in channels (mostly analog channels) compared to what you can get over cable. I would in general recommend QAM over OTA if you have the choice.

Edit: I'm not entirely sure if the ATI card supports analog channels over cable or not, but even if it does, that would be pointless since it only has one antenna/cable input and then you'd only be using it for analog channels and no HD at all.
 
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