ATI vs Hauppauge, Samsung Dual Layer DVD and More

Good morning everyone, welcome back to our not so little corner of the internet.  Things are bumping up here in the Northern portion of the HH labs so we are going to get straight to stirring the ol'news pot.

Enjoy you morning friends, here is your AM shot...

 ATI vs Hauppauge @ HTPCnews.com

"Using the Theater 550 Pro solely the softness doesn't stand out much. The bad part here is that unlike other capture devices I have used, the Theater 550 Pro's drivers do not offer sharpness control. What does stand out is how each of the capture cards handles a noisy analog cable signal. This is supposed to be the Theater 550 Pro's forte."

 Samsungs Double-Layer DVD Burner @ ipkonfig

"DVD technology is on a good rise for the consumers and it only grows each year. Now, Samsung comes out with their Double-Layer technology for their latest DVD recording technology. It offers a great deal of performance and stability--it's Samsung, would you expect something less? The Samsung DVD±R/RW - TS-H552B burner brings a lot to the table of DVD burning with its Double-Layer capability and its high-speed burning capacity."

 Hardware MPEG2 TV tuner round-up @ TechReport

"DirectX 9-class graphics cards have been available for some time, but a year ago, hardware MPEG2 TV tuners were only widely available from Hauppauge. This situation changed recently with the release of ATI's TV Wonder Elite and NVIDIA's NVTV, both of which offer hardware MPEG2 encoding. Hauppauge has also been busy revising and expanding its PVR lineup with products specifically designed for Media Center Edition 2005. But which hardware MPEG2 TV tuner reigns supreme? We've rounded up ATI's TV Wonder Elite, NVIDIA's NVTV, and Hauppauge's PVR-150MCE-l.p to find out."

 Asus K8V-X Motherboard Review @ CoolTechZone

"Asus has been catering to the needs of enthusiasts for quite some time now, and thus far they have succeeded in delivering some of the best user-friendly boards to the market. The fact that Athlon 64 754 platform isn't an overclocker friendly platform of choice shouldn't matter much to value users. Despite its drawbacks, it's still a great platform for budget users. This week, we have already evaluated three Athlon 64 754 boards and quite honestly the performance from one board to another is within five percent, if even that, is most cases. Of course we are talking about boards based on the KT800 chipset and not the KT800 Pro or NVIDIA's 250 and 250Gb chipsets. Once you start moving up the chipset chain, the performance goes up significantly. With performance goes up the price, which still is a great value for socket 754, but the counterparts to KT800 aren't as affordable as some of us would like them to be."

 Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PCIe Review @ Bjorn3D

"For a while, the Radeon X800 XT PE was the best ATI-based card you could get. At the end of last year, ATI changed that by releasing the X850 series of cards. Just like the X800 series, the X850 comes in several flavors: Pro, XT, and XT Platinum Edition (in order of least to most horsepower and therefore cost)."