The first thing I noticed about the card was the the color of the PCB and mounting hardware. While I have seen a trend for companies to use red PCB’s more often recently instead of the older “green standard”, the deep purple of this card’s PCB stood out nicely in contrast with the gold colored mounting hardware.
Looking closer, I could easily see the new THEATER™ 550 PRO chip mounted on the center of the PCB with the Samsung DDR-SDRAM module. While 16 Mb is not a large amound of RAM, it was nice knowing that having its own memory module the card shouldn’t leech performance away from the main video card or system memory unnecessarily.
 Top view of the card |
 Bottom view of the card |
 THEATER™ 550 PRO closeup |
 Samsung DDR-SDRAM module closeup |
On the side of the card you can see the coaxial inputs for both the TV and FM radio, as well as the DIN connector for the A/V input cable. Since my prior experience with TV tuner cards were using would fall into the “all in one” category, my first thought was why there weren’t any connections to output the signal to an external source. Upon coming to my senses a moment later, I realized that since the primary video card in the PC is used for the actual output, there isn’t any need to include any on the card itself. Another nice thing I noticed was that there is no need to connect the card to anything but the PCI slot itself. All audio and video signal feeds are passed directly thru the PCI subsystem. A bonus for those of you out there who hate the restrictions of additional wiring in your system.
Side view of the card inputs
