Quote:
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Originally Posted by Mike
Erol
With the ATi 9800se AIW card does that mean you can record direct from the TV...........I was going to buy (in the future !!!!) and recordable DVD player but could this be my answer.....and easy to 'sell' the purchase to my wife 
Regards
Mike |
As Homealone says (and no I dont mind
) yes you can.
My setup has an normal TV aerial going into the graphics card, as well as a compsite video in from my sat TV box. This allows me to watch and or record (and pause live) terestrial TV and sat TV (though not both at once) to my PC's HD. I also have composite video out from the card running back to the TV, so that I can watch recorded stuff stored on the HD on the TV screen (as well as DVD's and any other video I might have on PC). It all adds upto quite a mess of cables between the PC and TV (and even more when you add in the leads from my PC's sound card to the 5.1 speakers) but other than this it's a great system. I have forever abandoned tape as a storage medium for video and am over the moon to be able to do so.
When my partner realised she could easily pause (just by pushing the pause button on the remote) eastenders from the sat TV, to go and make a cup of tea / answer phone / have a pee, she was 'blown away'. It's also a lot easier to schedule a recording than your average video recorder (though not maybe video plus recordings).
One futher thing to note about the 9800se is that it is essentialy a full blown 9800 chip that did not 'rate' high enough for ATi to sell as a full 9800, so they disable 4 of the 8 rendering pipelines and sell it as a 9800se (at about 1/2 price of full 9800). This disabling is done via the drivers and there are '3rd party' drivers that renable the unused 4 pipelines. It would seem that about 50% of these 9800se cards actualy run fine as full 9800 cards without any problems when this is done. So basically you get a 50/50 chance that you can actually get 9800 power at 9800se prices. Renabling the unuesd pipelines in now way damages your card. Simply try the alternate drivers. If they work (without any coruption / artefacts) then great you have a full 9800. If not just go back to the ATi drivers and you still have a great value card imo. See here for more info on this.
http://softmod.ocfaq.com/