Introduction
It has been nearly three years since I
reviewed
one of the first HDTV Tuner cards to hit the market. At
that time, the
Access DTV card
retailed for $400.00 and the only HDTV station available in my area was
the local CBS. While the adoption of High Definition has improved
greatly, I have to admit that it has been slower than I expected.
Equally as surprising is the limited availability of HDTV tuner
cards. Until recently, there were few players in this
market. I am happy to say that this is starting to change.
Manufacturers such as Hauppauge, ATI, and Dvico have developed
affordable HDTV cards. Today, we are looking at one of these
cards, the Dvico Fusion III Gold QAM. What makes this card unique
are some very exciting features that others do not offer.
Most notably is the reception of QAM modulated streams. What is
QAM you ask? Simply put, DIGITAL CABLE. This does NOT mean that
you can buy the card and get free pay stations. We'll get further
into this later. Let me first tell you how I came to know DVico.
A little over a year ago, I became a beta tester for DVico's line of
HDTV cards. What started as a stumble across a Google search
turned into a year long journey testing various production
and pre-production Dvico units. Before Dvico, all HDTV Tuner
cards were
hardware-based. This meant a dedicated
Mpeg-2 decoder and increased cost. Out of curiosity, I started
searching for a
software-only solution that would offer the same functionality at a
reduced cost. After all, the ATSC over-the-air signal is nothing
more than an Mpeg-2 stream, albeit at a very high resolution and
bitrate. While I was playing around at the
AVSForums, I saw that Korean-based
Dvico was accepting beta tester applications for a U.S. launch of
their HDTV cards. The first card I tested was their FusionHDTV
II,
shown above. The FusionHDTV II would be their first US
available HDTV Tuner card. It was also the first card on the
market to use a software-based HDTV decoder. Soon after the
release of the card, Dvico started experimenting with the possibility
of decoding QAM signals. With the existing tuner chip on the HDTV
II, it
was not possible. However, after several revisions of cards
and input from U.S. beta testers, Dvico delivered the Fusion III Gold
QAM.
It is the only
HDTV tuner card on the market which can
successfully decode QAM modulated digital cable stations.
Today, we are reviewing that card. Let us first look at the
specifications and features.
Specs and Features
The Fusion HDTV III Gold QAM is based
off of
Conexant's newest signal-decoder chip, the CX23882. Conexant has
long been the industry standard when it comes to tuner cards.
Their newest line of chips, is what allows the reception of QAM
signals. Working together with the decoder chip is a Tecmic tuner
chip. Since ATSC signals use standard UHF frequencies, the tuner
portion of the card is nothing
entirely
special. The card has two RF inputs, one is for CATV and one for
Over-The-Air. There is also an S-Video port and an Audio input
which can be used to capture video from a Digital Cable Box, Camera,
Playstation, etc. It can also be used to scale and upconvert
video from an S-Vid or Composite source to hi-res. The S-Video
port can be made into a composite port with a simple S-Video to
Composite adapter. Such an adapter is not currently included in
the package. When Dvico released the QAM version of this card, they
added a daughter board which can be seen in the third picture
below. I'm uncertain as to the exact functionality of this board.
Test
System / Decoding Options
Since the Fusion cards do not have a dedicated Mpeg-2 decoder
chip, the minimum system specs can be a bit stringent.
However if an ATI card is used (8500 and up), the fusion drivers
borrow the built-in Mpeg acceleration from the Radeon using DxVA
(DirectX Video Acceleration). The Fusion can take advantage of
DxVA using several GeForce cards as well. These cards include the
MX420, 440, and FX Series. Keep in mind that the nVidia list is
very specific. There are certain code operations that the DxVA
drivers will need to call upon from the GPU. Following
is a list of system requirements compared with my test system.
|
Required
|
My System
|
CPU (DxVA)
|
750 MHz
|
3200+
|
CPU (Pure Software)
|
1.6 GHz
|
3200+
|
Memory
|
266 DDR
|
PC 3200
|
Harddrive
|
UDMA 66
|
UDMA 100
|
Video Card Used
|
|
Radeon 9600
|
Amount of Memory
|
|
512 MB
|
Motherboard
|
|
Abit NF7-S
|
As you can see, the listed system specifications are not very
detailed. After testing the card, it is my opinion that the
specifications are a bit underrated. I would highly recommend
downloading the demo software before you even consider getting this
card. That's right! You can download a demo of the software and
an HDTV stream from DVico's website and begin watching HDTV
(pre-recorded streams only)
today. You can find a link to the demo software
here.
