Can I plug in 2xATi TV Tuner cards in my PC?

[desiplaya4life]

I have a dell xps 400 w/ windows MCE and a PCiExpress ATI Theatre 550pro tv tuner card came pre-installed. I have another same spare ATI Theatre550 Pro tv tuner card laying around (PCI/ Sapphire brand) can i run dual tuner setup if i wanted to? How hard would it be to make it work? And i use Windows MCE to watch/record my programs. so a little advice? Thanks guys=)

 

[Peter]

Provided the card drivers don't screw it up, that's a yes. You can have as many tuner cards in your system as you please. Will the total bandwidth of the machine allow simultaneous operation? You'll see when you try.

 

[desiplaya4life]

i dont want to try lol if its going to be slow=(


its a pentiumD dual core 2.8ghz/ 1gig ddr2 ram/ 250gb 7200rpm hd.

 

[desiplaya4life]

^^^

 

[manimal]

Try it out, you should be fine. Some people put up to 4 Tuner cards for recording multiple recordings at once to really pimp out their HTPCs. Check AVS forum and search for topics of about multiple capture cards, very informative site.

 

[desiplaya4life]

thank you

 

[rbV5]

MCE 2005, correct?

Just Install a decent splitter and cable on your TV cable feed. Shutdown, Install the card, attach the cable, boot into Windows. Let it install the driver automatically if your current driver is working fine (might have to reboot). Go into the MCE TV tuner setup and have it configure your tuners automatically so that both tuners are available to MCE.

That should be it. Test it by starting a recording and then changing the channel...you should be able to watch it without stopping the recording.

Theater 550 has onboard cache and hardware encoder ship, so bandwidth shouldn't be an issue at all, especially since they'll be on seperate busses. Drivers shouldn't be an issue if its currently working fine since you'll be using the same drivers.

Edit: Provided your Dell has a spare PCI slot for the card