I'll be moving up to a dorm in about a week so I thought I would pick up a TV tuner card instead of bringing up a TV. I don't really have too much interest in recording TV, although I would like to try and get some over-the-air HD channels. The dorm itself has cable so I assume they will just give me a coax cable drop.
My motherboard is a Asus P5Q-E so I only have 2 pci slots, the top one is being used by my x-fi sound card (which may or may not be really needed). The other one is right under my video cards' fan, so I don't think it would be a good idea to put it there. That leaves me with my pci-e slots. I have been looking at the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1800, but I think it might be overkill. I've also been looking at the WinTV-HVR-1250 although I can't find any reviews on it besides the newegg ones which rate it pretty bad. Another thing about the HVR-1250 is that it uses software encoding compared to the others which are hardware. Not sure if that would be an issue since my CPU (Q9450) is probably more powerful.
Just wondering if anyone had any opinions or suggestions on these or any other TV cards.
My motherboard is a Asus P5Q-E so I only have 2 pci slots, the top one is being used by my x-fi sound card (which may or may not be really needed). The other one is right under my video cards' fan, so I don't think it would be a good idea to put it there. That leaves me with my pci-e slots. I have been looking at the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1800, but I think it might be overkill. I've also been looking at the WinTV-HVR-1250 although I can't find any reviews on it besides the newegg ones which rate it pretty bad. Another thing about the HVR-1250 is that it uses software encoding compared to the others which are hardware. Not sure if that would be an issue since my CPU (Q9450) is probably more powerful.
Just wondering if anyone had any opinions or suggestions on these or any other TV cards.