TV tuner card on older PC

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brendon007

7 posts

Wannabe Geek

#9438 16-Sep-2006 21:22

Hi there

I would like to get a TV tuner card for my PC, however im not sure that my PC as it is resonably old will be able to run the card properly?

My PC specs are,

Packard Bell iconnect 850DWN
AMD Duron Processor 851mhz
128Mb Ram (2 x 64Mb)
Graphics card ??? 16Mb

Can anyone please advise on a good TV tuner card that will work with my PC or if not is there anything i can do to my PC to upgrade it so i can sucsefully install a TV card.

Thanks

Mark

1653 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 555

#48638 13-Oct-2006 23:36

It should run it fine, I used to have a TV tuner on a 486!

Actually displaying TV in a Window isn;t an issue, the tuner is pretty much just sending the video data straight over the bus into the graphics card ... not much CPU intervention required.
Where things may start to grinde is when you try recording TV .. unless you get a card with hardware compression then the CPU is going to be doing a lot of number crunching, more so if you want to encode into anything useful like MPEG 1/2 or 4. You might be able to get away with uncompressed video but then you need a fast disk system.

Hope that helps!

brendon007

7 posts

Wannabe Geek

#48818 16-Oct-2006 20:01

Thanks for your help!