*Recommended* system hardware with HVR-1600

Hi all,

I recently installed a Hauppauge HVR-1600 in my main computer. I upgraded from a Hauppauge PVR-150 that worked great.

The HVR-1600 has jumpy ATSC sound and video; the live and recorded sound and video are not played continously, almost as if the computer is struggling to keep up. I think it's my main computer hardware (which is circa 2004). Does anyone know if i need to upgrade any of the below components to resolve this jumpy sound/ video (eg. upgrade video or sound card)?

Current specs:
- 2.8 Ghz P4 Northwood
- 1 GB RAM
- Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti4200, 128 MB
- on-board sound

Windows task manager never shows more than 30% CPU load during live TV watching, so i don't think it's the CPU or the RAM. I have an extra PCI sound card laying around, but I don't know if trying that out would be fruitful. Would the video card be bottlenecking? If so, does anyone know the min recommended Nvidia chipset? 5500? 6200? ... and the recommended vid card memory size? (I am limited to the available 8X AGP cards on the market.)

Thanks!

ATI boards have newer chipsets on the AGP slots (Nvidia has apparently eliminated the AGP slot a few chipsets ago). Would a Radeon HD 3650 do the job?

This is all assuming that the bottleneck is the graphics card... how much demand would the ATSC Hauppauge cards put on the graphics cards anyway? Don't the Hauppauge cards do hardware encoding?

Thank you Walford; very insightful.

On a related note, I just spoke with Hauppauge tech support. The rep noted that the AGP bus throughput cannot withstand (or only barely) the required data volume for OTA ATSC viewing. He recommended upgrading to a vid card on a PCI-E bus.

Does anyone know if AGP cards can in fact support ATSC real-time viewing, or is PCI-E required? (The Hauppauge box and online docs do not mention this.)

Thanks much all.

Thanks again for the help, walford.

As FYI to everyone else on here, I got my card to work. Hauppauge includes the "Primary" utility within Star Menu/ Programs/ Hauppauge folder. My previous settings were using the "Force Primary" setting (the default, i believe), which couldn't keep up with real-time ATSC signals. I changed my settings in the Primary utility to "Allow VMR". I believe this allows my GeForce TI 4200, 128MB card (which according to walford is sufficient) to do all of the graphics accelerations. This has returned my real-time ATSC viewing to good quality.