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ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI TV Tuner

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14 User Reviews

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• Reviewed by: rgalverson

  Updated: 09-13-07

  Overall Rating: 2 Star Review

  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

  Updated: 06-17-07

  Overall Rating: 1 Star Review

  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

  Updated: 04-04-07

  Overall Rating: 4 Star Review

  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

  Updated: 03-18-07

  Overall Rating: 2 Star Review

  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

  Updated: 03-17-07

  Overall Rating: 4 Star Review

  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

• Reviewed by: Wildcard500

  Updated: 03-04-07

  Overall Rating: 3 Star Review

  Duration of ownership:6 Months

  Strengths: works

  Weaknesses: will not replace a home set top DVD Recorder

  Overall Evaluation: The 650 does record and work but the picture will never compair to my Pioneer DVR640HS the picture is crystal clear on the pioneer, the picture on the 650 wonder is lower than VHS quality i am sad to report, this really has bumbed me out i wish it would record super clear maybe it is how i have it hook up i don't know.

• Reviewed by: wiki223

  Updated: 03-02-07

  Overall Rating: 3 Star Review

  Duration of ownership:1 Months

  Strengths: dual tuner that can tune both analog and digital signal

  Weaknesses: no QAM (cable based digital signal) support

  Overall Evaluation: Based on ATI's latest Theater 650 Pro processor, TV WONDER 650 has made a great improvement from its predecessors, such as TV WONDER 550, HDTV WONDER. The biggest difference from the ATI HDTV Wonder is the hardware encoding for analog TV (the quality is much better than the software encoding found on most hybrid TV tuners such as the HDTV Wonder). But this doesn't mean it has two tuners. Actually it has only one tuner that can work on either analog or digital signal, but not the same time. According to the techniques this tuner has used, it should work great, but ATI's own software "Catalyst Media Center" suppresses its hardware advantages (the CMC has made my windows xp crash for several times). So I highly recommend use 3rd party software with this tuner, such as Beyond TV (I've tested that it works perfectly with 650), sage TV, watchHDTV (free software). There are no remote control and antenna in the box but you can free remote control from ATI's website(only need to pay the shipping fee ~$10). If you want to receive HDTV (ATSC) or analog TV signal by air, you need to buy an antenna. There is a useful website which can tell you which stations in your area broadcast on which frequencies (HDTV included), in which direction to point your antenna, and what kind of antenna you need: http://antennaweb.org.

• Reviewed by: utphfan

  Updated: 03-01-07

  Overall Rating: 3 Star Review

  Duration of ownership:2 Days

  Strengths: hardware encoding for analog TV

  Weaknesses: really buggy software

  Overall Evaluation: It can tune both analog and digital signal. But this is actually one single tuner not dual tuner. It either tunes analog or digital, but not both at the same time. The software "Catalyst Media Center" is totally a joke! shame on ATI! You should try some 3rd party applications like Beyond TV.

• Reviewed by: mistamoo

  Updated: 02-03-07

  Overall Rating: 4 Star Review

  Duration of ownership:1 Weeks

  Strengths: Great hardware, free over the air HDTV

  Weaknesses: Price, software sucks with not much support

  Overall Evaluation: I gave it 4 stars because once you download the driver from the website instead of using the included cd it works great. I used beyond tv 4.5 instead of the included software because the included software is lacking features. Beyond tv works great with this card, I can put the over the air hdtv and regular cable all in the same channel line up instead of switching between the analog signal and digital signal.

• Reviewed by: timbrill

  Updated: 01-24-07

  Overall Rating: 2 Star Review

  Duration of ownership:1 Months

  Strengths: size, supports standard TV and broadcast HDTV (but not at the same time), easy to install

  Weaknesses: poor picture, runs a little hot, a early revision was recalled make sure to get the new revision

  Overall Evaluation: I bought 3 ATI Wonder 650 cards to replace the 3 Hauppauge PVR-250 cards that I had been using in my HTPC. The Wonder 650 cards were supposed to provide substantially better picture quality on SDTV (standard definition television) than the PVR-250 according to all the reviews I read. But when I installed them I didnt find the picture quality better, instead I found it to be worse. I did a totally clean install from the beginning; reformatting my disk reinstalling Windows XP SP2, installing motherboard drivers, etc. I did a image backup of my hard disk before I installed the Wonder 650 driver so I'd have a pristine installation I could go back to in case I needed to install different versions of the driver. First I installed the drivers that came on the installation CD and started up my PVR program SageTV. Sage supports the ATI Wonder 650 board based on the Theater 650 chip as well as boards based on its predecessor the Theater 550 chip. i immediately noticed that the picture was much more grainy than that produced by the PVR-250s and that there was a herringbone noise pattern in the image as well. I wiped the disk and restored it from the image I made earlier and tried different drivers from ATI's web site wiping and restoring the hard disk after each installation. Even with the latest drivers (v6.14.10.225) I had the grainy picture and the herringbone noise pattern. I also tried recording at different bit rates to see if that helped. While the problem wasnt as severe at higher bit rates its still there. These cards have been a major disappointment. So I'm going back to my PVR-250s.

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