I'm trying to get me a TV-tuner card so I can finally record RPGM videos again. A lot of them seem to require 2GHz or more processing power, it seems. I've got this 1.8GHz dual-core processor, and I hear dual-cores count together, which would make me 3.6GHz overall. Is there any truth in this?

Also, a lot of these cards recommend ATI Radeon video cards. Am I being skrewed over for being an NVidia GeForce user?

Lastly, are PCI-E slots backwards-compatible with regular PCI cards?

Yes, Dual-core processors will run and even show up in the task manager as two proccessors. It's running power is equal to exactly what both of them combined would be. So you technically have a 3.6...

ATI may be recommended but isn't required. I've been using nVidia since the dawn of time and have ran quite a number of programs that recommend ATI, and I haven't had any issues. Sometimes I think the only reason it's "recommended" is because ATI slid them a few bills to be made recommended... at least, that would be a lot more interesting.

And PCI Express is not compatible with standard PCI cards. PCI Express is (for now) only made for video cards. PCI runs just about everything under the sun, from video cards, to NIC, to whatever. But the best video cards today use PCIE.

how does the tv tuner card work anyway?

I don't have much experience with them, but I do know they can take direct cable (or coax, whatever you want to call it) directly into a computer and can output it through a program to watch on your computer instead of a TV. I guess the same thing should work with consoles.

Well, this one requires the PCI-E slot (the Specifications tab):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6815129007

And it's not the only one at Newegg that does. Gonna have to check if I have regular PCI in this computer, though. If I can figure out how to recognize one.

Question about this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6815100020


The heck? A TV tuner card that requires a TV tuner card? Could somebody explain to me how this makes sense?

Actually, I kind of forgot about that. The PCIE slot required for THAT card is:


(the smaller sized ones even though the one on the far left is also PCI Express)

I haven't really ever used that slot before, truth be told... can't really find anything that uses it. Well, minus TV tuner cards, apparently.



Ummm... actually, that beats the heck out of me. The only thing I can think of is that they may be saying that the computer requires that the software for the card be installed before installing the actual card into you computer.

I managed to find a USB device, instead. Hopefully it works with Vista. Strangely, the product info says it works with Vista while reviews say it doesn't. As long as it works for Vista (perhaps a driver update) and there's no noticeable delay (wanna be able to play non-RPGs on this), I'm good.