Terratec has added a new model to its extensive range of TV tuner cards. The Cinergy 2400i DT is unusual in two respects; in part because it carries dual digital tuners but mainly because it uses a PCI Express interface. That's right, someone has finally come up with a use for the PCI Express 1x expansion slots that have been appearing on motherboards for the past year.

The system requirements for the 2400i demand that you run either Windows XP SP2 or Windows Media Centre Edition, but we doubt that many people will be running earlier versions of Windows on PCI Express hardware anyway, and similarly a 2GHz Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon CPU and 512MB RAM are par for the course these days.

We installed the Terratec in a Windows XP SP2 PC because that's the intended market for 2400i DT as it includes CyberLink PowerCinema 4.5 and a remote control. If you have Windows Media Center Edition you'll find that the cut-down MCE edition which comes without these extras and sells for £15 less will suit you admirably.

Installation of the card was easy enough, although there is no paper guide in the box and instead you have to find the appropriate PDF on the CD. Once the drivers and CyberLink software were installed we plugged a FreeView box into a regular TV aerial and then connected the coaxial cable to the single input on the backplate of the Terratec card.

Unlike some TV tuners there are no options for outputting video to a TV or connecting audio to your hi-fi, so you'll be using the outputs from your graphics card and sound card. In other words, what you're getting for a fairly small amount of money is the dual digital tuner facility.

This allows you to watch one channel while you record another, or use picture-in-picture and watch two channels simultaneously. You can also time-shift, which means that you pause live TV and watch it when you are ready, say after a phone call, but that's also a feature of DVD-RAM, which just goes to show that there are often many solutions to a given problem.

Speaking of problems, the FreeView postcode checker (www.freeview.co.uk) tells us that we can't get the service in our part of Cheltenham, and humorously it reports that the GCHQ Signals Intelligence site (www.gchq.gov.uk) which is a couple of miles away can "receive FreeView but will probably need a new type of aerial." We suspect that GCHQ could pick up a TV signal from Mars without too much trouble. The advice here is to confirm you have an appropriate digital signal before you buy your TV tuner.

Despite Freeview's negative response we found that the scanning facility picked up five TV stations which was adequate for testing and meant that we could get to grips with the Terratec remote control which is conventional enough, apart from the array of bright orange buttons. It communicates with a USB receiver and Terratec supplies a software utility that allows you to reconfigure the function of each button.

Verdict
Terratec has broken new ground with the Cinergy 2400i DT as this DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial) card comes with dual digital tuners and uses a PCI Express interface. The package of card, software and remote control is good value but the output options are rather limited.

Company: TerraTec

Contact: 00 49 2157 81790

Tags: tv tuner card television windows xp microsoft windows freeview pci express operating system cablecard