Related Articles

Installation & Software

For some reason, the USB2 Deluxe did not want to play nice on our nForce 2 system originally - the drivers caused a BSOD when the unit was initialized. While it wasn't a clean system, a device should not cause a kernel panic. One of the concerns that we brought up with our original WinFast 2000 XP review was the fact that the drivers were not WHQL certified. This highlights why this is an important process for manufacturers to go through. We ended up reinstalling Windows from scratch. With just the drivers for the RADEON 8500 LE and the nForce 2 chipset ForceWare drivers installed, the Leadtek detected, installed and initialized the drivers without a problem.

The software has not changed much since the TVExpert2000 days. Leadtek has a different approach than the big button big menu approach that is seen in the CyberLink and Intervideo solutions. The software interface has a decidedly computer centric feel and does not have the CE slant and feel that other PVR packages seem to have. We were critical of the CyberLink interface because it was overly simple, compromising usability for simplicity but Leadtek's PVR software swings to the other end of the pendulum. The software is not immediately intuitive and this should always be a design consideration. Leadtek does allow for a lot more options than either the CyberLink and Intervideo solutions and they should be commended for this. However TV Tuners are shifting increasingly towards the digital living room paradigm and an overly complex design scheme will be counterproductive for widespread adoption.

Performance and Testing

Performance will be a key factor with the WinFast USB2 Deluxe even more so than with a regular card for a couple reasons. Mobile systems are generally not as powerful as the average desktop system which means that low CPU utilization will be a key factor. Secondly, USB incurs a fairly high overhead. When the USB2 bus is saturated in our desktop motherboard reviews, processor usage is roughly around 10% even Athlon64 and Pentium 4 systems. We will not be using a laptop with today's testing but once again we will revisit a Socket A based test bed consisting of the following

• AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Mobile @ 11*166
• DFI Lan Party NFII Ultra B
• Crucial Ballistix PC4000
• ATI RADEON 8500 LE 64 Meg
• Windows XP SP1
• Maxtor 80GB IDE HD

The video sample sizes for the review of the WinFast 2000 TV Expert unit were on the smaller size so some of the results may be a bit in accurate. We have also moved to Perfmon from the eyeball processor usage estimation through taskmanager so again, the ones listed for the USB2 Deluxe and the Theater 550 should be more accurate than that of the 2000TV Expert.

Judging by the numbers though, it does not seem like they are too far off. The USB2 deluxe pulls in very similar numbers to the WinFast 2000 unit in both the file size and processor usage departments. In fact, it does not seem that going through the USB2 bus was detrimental to the processor usage at all. It also seems like Leadtek is still relying on the same set of codecs that were distributed with the WinFast 2000 unit as file sizes are very similar to what was observed before. Again some of the differences can be accounted to the shorter length of the recorded clips on the 2000.

Processor usage compared to the Theater 550 unit however is no contest. The difference in performance between the Leadtek and the ATI based solution is tilted all the way over to the ATI side. One advantage the Leadtek unit does have are the different encoding options, a feature that not available on the Theater 550. The resolution does drop from 640x480 to 320x240 on the non-MPEG2 options.