Dom Robinson reviews

for PC

Distributed by
3dfx

• Price: £99.99

Once installed, the back of the card contains connections for inputs from a TV aerial, FM radio aerial, composite video, s-video from devices such as a camcorder and a cable-ready 125-channel TV tuner. With the s-video input you can record mini-movies onto your hard drive in MPEG1, for the same quality as Video CD, or an uncompressed AVI file. If your want is simply to time-shift simple TV programmes, the digital VCR facility can be used to program in as many recordings as you like, with variable quality settings.

There are downsides though. Firstly, there's no slider when playing back a recording, so you can't go straight to a specific part without a lot of fast-forwarding if you happen to stop part-way through. You can play back the MPEG1 files on Windows Media Player, which has a slider but has more of a tendancy for the picture to go out of sync with the sound if you're using your PC for other things at the same time and especially in DOS, whereas the "play" function on the digital VCR doesn't get affected so badly.

Another problem, which seems quite a staggering omission to me, is the lack of an s-video output connection, as you'd find on a DVD-ROM player for example. In fact there's only inputs to be found on the card, bar an audio-out which will be inside the PC allowing you to daisy-chain the audio from your CD-ROM drive via the Voodoo TVFM to your soundcard. I can watch programmes on the TV via my Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card - but it's not as good as a dedicated output from the TV tuner card would be - and this sort of output I'd only use for games where pixel-perfect definition isn't as high a requirement as DVD.

Radio fans will be pleased with the inclusion of an FM radio once an aerial is connected. Scan up and down the dial for your favourite stations, confirm the presets then sit back and enjoy. Also built in is an MP3 encoder. The way it should work is by registering the product with their website, 3dfxgamers.com, but the program to complete the process is not available online for download. Either that or parts of their site just aren't working as they should.

Two other additions I must mention are the Skin Paks, a selection of onscreen remote control layouts to suit many different tastes. I still found myself using the original one though. The teletext facility is a most welcome on. All the pages come up instantly once it's taken a few seconds to load them all in. You can also cycle through the sub-pages just as easily. This feature is fantastic and I'd rather use this one than that on my TV.

Finally, I must finish this review stating the problem I had getting the card to work properly. When I used the drivers supplied, it refused to do anything else than presume I had an NTSC signal and the U.K. wasn't a viable country option to select. Trying the new drivers online failed, although then going back to the old ones did resolve this. The fun was short-lived and continues to be so when the program just crashes for no reason whatsoever - either at random times while in use or when it's not in use and you press 'tv' on the supplied remote - and your PC is instantly rebooted! I then found that Windows thought it was not installed and tried to reinstall the NEW drivers, thus rendering the program useless until I went and changed them back. I hope that was easy to follow as it was quite a mind-bender for me!

In short, when it works, it's very useful. When it resets your machine with no prior warning, it's the bane of your life and as such this marks the product down considerably.

Overall: 2/5

This review was on Freeloader.com before they closed.

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000.

DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.

PC games reviewed by the editor are on: