Conclusions
Hauppauge’s PVR line of cards has held the crown for hardware MPEG2 TV tuner cards for the past few years, and while the PVR-150MCE l.p. has low CPU utilization and the quickest initialization and channel change times, its image quality is clearly lacking. The bundle could also use a DVD decoder to meet Media Center Edition 2005's compatibility requirements. Still, it's the only true low profile card in the round-up, and at $67 online, it's certainly affordable.

The TV Wonder Elite is a new contender in the hardware MPEG2 TV tuner market, and ATI has packaged the Elite as an all-inclusive solution that comes with everything you need to transform your PC into a personal video recorder. With low CPU utilization, good image quality, and an excellent remote control, it's a pretty slick solution. However the bundled PowerCinema software seems like a step backwards from ATI's old Multimedia Center, and it doesn't even come close to the functionality of Media Center Edition 2005. At $133 online, the TV Wonder Elite is by far the most expensive tuner in this round-up. You get what you pay for, though; the remote alone is worth $50.

Surprisingly, the best image quality comes from the least expensive tuner, eVGA’s $65 NVTV. The card's bundled NVDVD decoder also makes the card ready to run with Media Center out of the box, provided you have a DirectX 9 graphics card. That's something the other cards lack. The NVTV does have its shortcomings. The card's CPU utilization tends to be a little higher than the others, although not by a significant enough margin to cause concern. The driver bug that plagued our Athlon 64 test system is also a cause for concern, although the card had no issues with our Intel test platform.

Overall, it's hard to come up with a verdict. The PVR-150MCE l.p. is easy to discount due to its comparatively poor image quality. Although the TV Wonder Elite has great image quality, works flawlessly, and comes with a swanky remote, it costs twice as much as the competition. The eVGA NVTV, which also has low CPU utilization and great image quality, runs only $62 online and comes bundled with the NVDVD decoder, making it perfect for Media Center Edition and thus our Editor's Choice. Just keep in mind that if you have an Athlon 64 system with a VIA chipset, you might want to avoid the NVTV until NVIDIA resolves its issues with that platform. 

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