Watching TV on the PC has become quite popular among many of our fellow geeks -- even spilling into the general retail market. MSI's Personal Cinema is the first of its kind in Australia. It isn't exactly your very own IMAX theatre, but it's another of those video convergence cards, with wonderful tiddlies like TV and DVD capabilities, and video in/out.
Installing the GeForce FX 5200 card takes a decent amount of effort with many PC cases, as the TV-in plug was placed in a slightly awkward position, ready to prevent the card from jacking in anywhere. Relying on passive cooling this card tends to get a tad hot at times, but seems to handle this fine. If you already have enough hot items in place, you may have the inclination to invest in a replacement HSF.
Normally we wouldn't mention installation of the software, but these two discs are evil itself. As soon as you shove a CD into the drive, the install begins and completes with no prompts at all. Luckily it has the dignity to prompt for a restart, but that's it. Great for newbies that don't know how to move a mouse, but horrific for the rest of us.
After the attack of the CDs, the TV tuner actually provides some enjoyably good quality viewing, with full-screened telly barely showing any loss in quality. TV sound is also riddled with impeccable goodness, with no horrible muffles blaring at you, just pure crisp audio. Like any other it also supports recording, and it does a great job of it too, encoding files in the mpeg format. Of course, you'll want to re-encode these to something more compressed like the ever-popular DivX. Much of the supplied software that insists on installing can be a little obscure to use -- if their interfaces were tweaked to a more logical design, reading help files wouldn't be necessary. A prime example is NVDVD 2.0 -- not the best choice in DVD playing software.
The remote control, looking rather familiar, has the good measure of controls on it that many-a-DVD movie buff have come to expect. As it's based on RF tech, you have the ability to control it from the next room to piss your mates off. The funny thing; this is the exact same controller that the RADEON ALL-IN-WONDERs come packaged with.
We guess this has to do with the 'why fix something that's fully functional' train of thought.Overall, the Personal Cinema provides top quality TV displayage and is perfect for the mini multimedia PC. Aside from its foibles, if you're after a budget video card equipped with rather impressive TV capabilities, this won't cease to impress.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012