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As multimedia becomes more popular, a growing selection of souped-up graphics boards are doing more than handling your high-end graphics. Asustek has released a card that takes that to a new level, performing triple duty as a TV tuner, video card, and graphics board supporting a second monitor or TV.

Asustek's competitive target is market leader ATI and its popular $329 All-in-Wonder Radeon. Both products are adroitly similar, bundling TV functions and multimonitor support, and both include personal video recorder software that lets you rewind, pause, and slow-motion play almost-live TV over a PC.

The V7100's lower price and comparable performance will pique your interest if you are looking for a graphics board with acceptable 3D performance and hosts of bells and whistles. But this card doesn't take the trophy for best 3D graphics out there.

Price, Quality Trade-offs Vary

For graphics, Asustek uses NVidia's GeForce2 MX graphics chip set, which takes adequate care of PC graphics with 32MB of memory. In PC World lab tests, the V7100 Deluxe Combo performs equally to that of the $105 Asustek AGP-7100 Pure video card with the same NVidia chip set. That means there's no trade-off beyond the over-$80 price difference when it comes to performance versus added functions.

But when PC World pit the V7100 Deluxe Combo against ATI's All-In-Wonder Radeon with 32MB of memory, ATI showed noticeably faster frame rates and 3D texturing under gaming conditions.

Asustek is using a low-cost version of the NVidia graphics chip set, as ATI does with the Radeon. Those chip sets offer adequate graphics performance but can't compete with high-end alternatives.

As for the TV tuner card, video quality is crisp and colors aren't washed out, as can be the case with some cards.

Jack of All Trades

The V7100 board is a veritable Swiss Army knife for all your PC's entertainment needs, but too many of the blades are dull. The 3D glasses weren't ready out of the box, the video editor is rudimentary, and the time-shifting feature occasionally froze the program, forcing me to crash the software.

Like many in its class, this video card is targeted to consumers with systems running at least a 600-MHz processor with a mammoth hard disk. You'll want to keep that in mind if you plan to use the digital VCR functions. When recording video at the "good" quality setting, an hour of video hogs a gigabyte on the hard disk.

Initially, the promise of bringing swanky video options to my desktop was exciting. But ultimately, I was disappointed. The features list is long, but too many software kinks remain.

However, boob tubers interested in complementing a home entertainment PC, without springing for the big bucks associated with the likes of TiVo, which starts at $300 for the hardware and a $10 monthly subscription, should consider the V7100 Deluxe Combo for its core competencies.

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