Performance and Video Quality
For normal playback of a TV or S-Video signal, CPU usage on our Athlon FX-53 based test system with 1GB of RAM, lingered at around the 35% mark. We also ran some testing of CPU usage when recording video, both from the TV signal and from a DVD player plugged into the S-Video interface. Using the MPEG 2 encoding option of the AVerTV utilised around 45% of CPU time while recording, which seemed to vary little regardless of what encoding quality was selected. This appears to be higher than some competing products, but all videos were recorded successfully without any stuttering or dropped frames. All in all, acceptable performance, and the quality of recordings was good.
Video quality
Video quality is, of course, largely a subjective thing, and can also depend on the quality of the signals input into it. First off, it has to be said that the RF antenna provided with the package was next to useless during my testing, only picking up the faintest and fuzziest of TV signals. However, once the card was hooked up to a proper external antenna, I was hugely impressed. For some time now I've been using a PCI Happauge WinTV card to watch TV on my PC, connected through a rather long cable to the nearest aerial socket in another room, and I'd always put the relatively poor picture quality down to the aforementioned cable. But, with this same cable, the AVerTV delivered a far better-looking, cleaner TV picture than my WinTV card had ever managed - A fantastic achievement for such a small piece of kit. Picture quality through the S-Video cable was also very good, so top marks all around in this, arguably most important, discipline.