Sigh...another disappointment by ATI. What looked like a very promising card turned out to be nothing but headaches for me. It's a great card when it works, but be ready for some serious hair pulling when things go wrong. I've been working with this card for about 2 weeks now, troubleshooting, reinstalling, and playing with and this is what I have to say.

First, The Good

The picture quality is fine. I have a 19" monitor and am splitting the cable 3 ways, but it is still watchable. These TV tuner cards will look much nicer if you have a smaller monitor and have ample power feeding it. It is not much different than the Hauppauge WinTV. I really can't tell the difference except for the GUI.

Another nice feature is the newer packaged TV Wonders come bundled with GuidePlus. It works seemlessly with the card and it is nice to be able to see and record tv shows in advance. GuidePlus covers most of the United States. You just put in your zip code on install and select the appropriate channel lineup (ex. msg = 10, msnbc = 33, etc).

The only main difference between the TV Wonder PCI and the TV Wonder VE is that the regular TV Wonder can capture in MPEG-2 and output stereo sound. Whether or not thats worth an extra 30 bucks is up to you. I thought it was.

The BAD

Jeeez, can ATI ever make a decent set of drivers!?!? I have owned 4 different ATI cards and the only thing they all have in common is that there is always SOMETHING that goes wrong. Most of the time, it can be easily fixed, but it is extremely annoying. My first and foremost gripe is the non-existence of any WinXP drivers. I do not understand how a company can just ignore every single Dell, Compaq, Sony, HP, Gateway and eMachine user who bought their computer in the last year. I tried using the Windows 2000 drivers hoping they will work but they don't. So if you have XP, sorry. Of course, no Linux drivers.

I was able to get it running in Win98 and Win2k though. But I had to be very delicate with it. Any real stress on my system (burn a cd, transfer large files) would cause crashes. Bad ones. The kind where it would cause windows protection errors and where I had to completely power down my machine to get my DVD drive working again. Other than that, it would work perfectly, but please use the latest drivers and ATI multimedia center. Otherwise you'll likely regret it.

A friend of mine also has this same card with little or no problems. He has a slightly different setup, which might be the root of all my problems. It has been less than pleasant to be using a VIA southbridge all these years, and frankly I'm surprised this card even works. Getting the newest (4.38v) VIA PCI IRQ miniport drivers did not help either.

These are my relevant system specs:
Abit KT7-RAID
Tbird 1.2
Elsa GF2ultra
IBM DTLA 307030
256M rev. 3 mushkin pc133

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 65