AIW 9800Pro or 9800Pro + TV Card

[JohnWB]

At the moment I have a MEDION TV card with (I think) a Philips 7134 chip which seems to work fine for capturing using VirtualVCR. I am going to change my old Video card to an ATI 9800Pro. Should I keep the old MEDION card and get a 9800Pro or Get an AIW 9800Pro for an extra 70 to 80 UKP. Would there be much difference in the capturing performance & quality of pictures

[Heywould3]

The TV cap and features are usually good to very good with the AIW based cards. they have good cap SW and lots of formats/features for caping. the only thing you might run into is that on 90% of the AIW cards they will sell a 9800pro and a aiw9800pro but the AIW will have slightly less gaming performence. they have made some AIW that are equal to their "gaming cards" but its marketed that way.. a good example is my AIW card.. i have the AIW8500 and at the time they made a 8500 game card AIW8500 and an AIW8500DV mine was marketed (AIW8500) as same gaming engine as standard 8500.. what you need to do is goto ati.com and look at the specs of the two cards.. they have a compair option.. you might find that the clock speed on the AIW9800 is slightly slower .. but still not a bad way to go..

hope this helps..

BTW you might get a few people that are anti ATI AIW because of driver issues.. well ive always been an ati user and never once had a problem EVER.. the 9800 are great cards and they have outstanding SW and driver support.. and ATI has really upgraded their support.

Hope this helps

[JohnWB]

Thanks for the advice. I did a check regarding the performance of the 9800PRo & AIW 9800Pro & they seem to exactly the same & a test in PCPRO a couple of months age gave the same results apart from one where the AIW was slighly faster. Regarding the drivers, are there any built into XP as the NVIDEA ones in XP are quite good