ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI TV Tuner

ATI's leadership in digital TV technology clearly shows in TV Wonder 650. The Theater 650 Pro processing core combines hardware MPEG encoding and PVR, digital audio with noise reduction and hybrid tuner for analog or high-definition digital ATSC (DVB-T) TV reception. The adaptive 3D comb filter delivers picture purity rivaling high-end TV sets. Catalyst Media Center software makes it easy to watch, pause or record your favorite digital or analog shows. The TV Wonder 650 comes in PCI and is ready for Windows XP, XP with MCE or Windows Vista.

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• Reviewed by: rgalverson

  09-13-07

  Duration of ownership: 10 Months

  Strengths: Pulls in ATSC channels from 30+ miles away

  Weaknesses:CMC is lame, has never been updated, and EPG is totally broken

  Overall Evaluation: ATI has a decent tuner card, and the driver seems to work well enough now. The CMC viewer application is lame. Worst is inability to add channels manually. ATI hasn't made a single update to fix CMC bugs. In fact, the EPG used to try to work, but now it is completely broken (maybe the EPG server changed).

• Reviewed by: tlmercur

  06-17-07

  Duration of ownership: 5 Days

  Strengths: Box looks very nice.

  Weaknesses:Box description does not meet any expectation.

  Overall Evaluation: ATI Wonder card is lame technology with a nice wrapper at best. To bad there are not any "product Police" to get rid of high flash low delivery products. In the end consumers have to buy and try before getting the real details and then are left with junky products. ATI is now at the bottom of my brand name trust. So, if you buy this product what you will get is: a low resolution box on your screen that makes scratchy noises every time you change the channel. After installing the card and software I started having problems with the sound unexpectedly going mute. Other issues include lock up of catalyst software and CPU % going up to 100% with no resolving. Have to end app of catalyst several times before getting it to start up right. I have digital cable with HD channels and the best the 650 can do is get regular analog cable channel, no HD, no digital channels. You are really better off buying a system already prebuilt with Windows media and an OEM tested TV receiver, save yourself the grief.

• Reviewed by: openwheelracing

  04-04-07

  Duration of ownership:

  Strengths: Very stable drivers. Best available hardware analogue encoder available. Easy to setup.

  Weaknesses:MCE's signal checker bug. Unable to use both digital and analogue tuner at the same time. No QAM support

  Overall Evaluation: This is a terrific tuner. The drivers have been rock solid reliable for me. The digital tuner (Samsung) gives crystal clear high def images. The analogue encoder is simply the best you can find. Slim and low profile design gives you better airflow in the case. I have both HVR-1600 as well as this card. They have identical picture quality for ATSC, but the ATI 650 has a much better image quality for NTSC.

• Reviewed by: kayman01

  03-18-07

  Duration of ownership: 5 Months

  Strengths: Picture and sound are great when it works.

  Weaknesses:Bugs. No HD recording compression - 6GB/hr for HD. Only one tuner band can be used at a time - you cannot flip through analog and digital channels easily. Cannot manually program channels.

  Overall Evaluation: OS: WinXP Pro. System: Intel Celeron 2.93 with 1GB RAM, Video: ATI Radeon 7500 and/or 9100 Integrated. When it works, this card and included software produce awesome OTA HD picture and sound. The tuner is as strong as that in my HDTV. When playing back recordings, the sound and images are much better using the included software than using something like windows media player. However, the card and software are very buggy. If the first Tivos worked like this, they would have gone out of business. This is not a feasible replacement. I must boot my computer twice after being powered down each time for the card to function (warm boot must follow cold boot). If you lose HD signal while watching a program, the included software frequently crashes. The electronic programming guide for HD doesn't work for me and the service that downloads it is a resource sucking annoyance. There is a documented bug for the EPG issues. Programming the card to record with the included software works less than half the time. Usually it crashes as it begins or soon after it starts recording which is very frustrating. The card sucks resources on my somewhat old machine. HD recordings are in mpg format and are 6GB/hour. The hardware compression/archival to DVD doesn't seem must faster than other software compression methods I have used. It is also not very smart about letting you size the videos you want to put on DVD. You cannot use the software to change the format/quality of the videos on your HD. Finally the saved files sometimes refuse to open and crash the software. Frequently you have to try numerous times to play a file. You cannot manually program channels... all must be auto-detected/auto tuned. A bad crash wipes out your channel list. You cannot schedule recordings for more than one TV tuner on the card at a time. Either the analog OTA channels, analog cable channels, or digital OTA channels are available at a time. Thus you cannot easily channel surf between analog and digital versions of a channel, say if your HD broadcast suddenly drops out.

• Reviewed by: mellowk

  03-17-07

  Duration of ownership: 5 Months

  Strengths: Easy to install software and hardware, low profile card, doesn't miss frames

  Weaknesses:Price, it was over $100 but I got it on sale.

  Overall Evaluation: I bought a Wonder 650 card some months ago after a bad experience with a TV card from a company called KWorld. I bought it so I could watch TV while using my computer and convert some old VHS tapes to something I could put on a DVD. I found the hardware installation to be easy as all you need to do is install it in a empty PCI slot. The card is low profile so it should fit in most computers. The software was just as easy to install and allowed me to do exactly what I wanted, e.g. watch TV, convert old tapes and make DVDs. The TV shows look much better than they did with the KWorld card and the VHS conversions don't have a bunch of stuttering and missing frames. All in all I'm pretty satisfied with my purchase

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