PowerColor Theater 550Pro TV Tuner Review - PAGE 4

Performance and Testing

The PowerColor Theater 550Pro is the first tuner card that we have looked at that claims support for MPEG2 hardware encoding and should have a big advantage in terms of processor usage and we will take a look at how it performs against the Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP Expert unit as well as AOpen's XC Cube which featured a simliar TV card as the Leadtek unit. One thing of note is that the XC Cube is an Intel based unit which had a socket 478 P4 3.0 - the Leadtek unit was tested with very similar specs - a Gigabyte nForce 2 motherboard along with a RADEON 8500 with a Barton 2500+. The specifications of the test system for the Theater 550Pro are as follows:

• 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

Again there are some slight variances between the test system used for the Leadtek unit and the one for the Theater 550Pro but the differences are large enough that it should not matter. The XC Cube is based on an entire other platform and processor completely but is included here as a point of reference and NOT as a direct comparison.

TV Playback is very similar across all three tuners. I think that this is more dependent on the video card than the TV tuner as it relies on the overlay generated (like for DVD playback). The Theater 550 does the best still however.

Pausing refers to a PVR function where we hit the pause button during live TV - this starts queuing up the video from the live feed into the hard drive until the user hits play again. I do not know if the Theater 550 defaults to a different quality mode but processor usage is VERY low especially when compared to the XC Cube which hits around a 55% average.

Timeshifting is playing back the paused video - this is more intensive because the TV program is not being displayed in real time yet. Video queued on the hard drive is being played back while new material is still being recorded. The Theater 550 once again shines and CPU usage is not even 20% of what is seen with the XC Cube.

Straight video recording is equally as impressive. Processor usage is 4-5 times LESS than what is seen with the very similar Leadtek setup. The XC Cube with the better processor in the P4 3.0 still lags behind significantly and processor usage is 2-4 times higher than that with the Theater 550Pro. For those with slower processors lying around that can be recruited for HTPC or PVR duties, be sure to pair it with a card that does hardware MPEG2 encoding like the Theater 550 as the difference between the cards is phenomenal.

The Theater 550Pro has a 16MB buffer onboard to help feed the 550 chip