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It has been quite a while since ATi has released anything really new in tuner cards, and the cards from other companies don’t show much new for the HTPC crowd. Anyone who wishes to build an HTPC with DVR qualities will want to keep a constant eye on the crop of tuner cards available.

Now ATi has released a 2 new cards that allow the tuning of terrestrial digital signals, non-encrypted cable signals, and analog signals of terrestrial or cable origin. The first card has two tuners, making it very useful for those not having lots of open slots on the motherboard, and simplicity of set up.

This card is PCI Express, and has no major drawbacks, save for the limitation of not being able to tune two of the same type of signal concurrently. As terrestrial analog television will soon be gone, it seems a little shortsighted of ATi to do this. Perhaps a newer version is forthcoming.

The second of these tuner cards is a PCI card, and employs only one tuner. It will do all that the PCI Express card will do, but would have to be used in pairs to provide the service that the PCIe model does. Of course, it costs less, but I think that the lion’s share of buyers will opt for the dual tuner card, if purchasing in the near future.

(Of all the manufacturers making tuner cards, ATi has the widest range of features, and has demonstrated quality of build in the past. It is truly a shame that no manufacturer has a really deluxe model, which would have all the features HTPC users want.)

this unit is nice, and there is a PCI model available, but its capabilities are limited, compared to the ATi models above

The ATi tuners will tune the television spectrum, and cable spectrum, using the Clear QAM method, but many, including me, wonder why no manufacturer has embraced the CableCARD standard*, which would allow the tuning of premium cable content, and allow the build of an HTPC with no extra boxes. That, as the British say, would be brilliant!

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*ATi has a cableCARD unit available, but its performance is very poor, and has gotten poor ratings from several sources, leading opinions to move from the possibility of defective samples