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Looking
at the specs on page 1, it's easy to think that
installing one of these cards in your system means
a slew of cables cluttering the back of your PC.
But
notice that there is only 1 RF (F-Type) connector
on the back of the card. Both TV and FM
signals are received through this single
connection. If you're in an area where your
cable provider also supplies FM radio signals
through a single wire, this is great and offers
excellent sound quality. If your cable
provider does not supply FM radio signals you will
have to use a splitter / combiner in conjunction
with an FM antenna to take full advantage of the
card.
Satellite
TV customers should also be aware that you will
need to split a signal off of your satellite
receiver to connect to the Voodootv.
All channel changing will have to be done from
your receiver. At the surface this may sound like
a hassle but if you're really into your toys,
couple a remote control room extender with your
satellite receiver and Voodootv and you've
got a sweet little setup.
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| Quality
and Installation Of The 3dfx
Voodootv 200 PCI |
| Let's
get down to business... |
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As
always, we like to give any new product a close
look to assess it's physical quality. The
Voodootv 200 is very clean and relatively
simple compared to many of the other products
we've reviewed here on H.H. There is
absolutely nothing to speak of on the back of the
card, it's on the front where all of the good (and
one not-so good) things are going on.
The
card at the top of this picture is a Hauppauge
WinTV-FM PCI. The card at the bottom
is the Voodootv 200. 3dfx
is the first to offer an add-in card using
Microtune's "tuner-on-a-chip" (Microtuner)
technology and the first area where this apparent
is the physical size of the tuner. Notice
the large metal shielding on the WinTV board as
opposed to the much smaller Voodootv.
Besides the fact that this new technology is
smaller, it also offers many benefits over the
last generation of tuner products. Because is it a
single programmable chip, it can be set up to
provide better reception than the older generation
tuners. For example channel isolation is probably
the most important issue because there is usually
programming on every channel available on any
given cable system. The dual conversion Microtuner
used on the Voodootv 200 PCI is more
discriminating than traditional tuners and can
"filter" out stray frequencies which in
turn provides superior performance in tuning each
channel. The Microtuner can also find
channels much faster than traditional tuners.
There
are a minimal amount of internal connections to
make with the Voodootv. All you have
to do is connect a cable from the audio-out to any
stereo input on your sound card. Don't have
any connections left on your sound card? No
problem...the audio connectors on the Voodootv
act as a pass through. You can connect your
CD-ROM's audio cable to the CD-in jack and use the
supplied cable to go from the audio-out to the CD
input on your sound card and the Voodootv
and your CD-ROM will share the input.
The
only gripe we have with this card is a fairly
minor one. If you look at the bottom of the
picture above you'll see a small metal item
standing off the board. This is a crystal
(used to generate clock frequencies) and if it
sticks straight out, it just barely clears the
adjacent PCI slot. We had to bend it
slightly to make sure it didn't short any
connections on the back of another card in our
test system. It would have been better if
3dfx mounted this crystal flat on the PCB.
This is not a huge problem but the potential to
short another card or to break the crystal bending
it is there.
Installation
of the card and drivers was an absolute
breeze. Insert the card into an available
PCI slot, boot into Windows bypassing the
"Found New Hardware" messages and run
"Setup" from the supplied driver CD and
you are off and running. We installed the
Voodootv in a system with 4 other PCI slots
used (modem, NIC, sound and SCSI) and there were
no problems to report at all.
Control
Panels and Screenshots
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