Product Reviews

KWorld's DVB-T PE310 is the second expansion card, after Terratec's Cinergy 2400i DT (Labs, Shopper October 2006), we've seen to use the fast PCI-E x1 interface. The extra bandwidth this gives over PCI hasn't been wasted, as KWorld has fitted this card with dual hybrid-digital tuners.

If you find yourself in an area with poor digital reception, you can switch to the old analogue signal and still watch one side while you record a programme on another. Before buying, check you have a free PCI-E x1 slot, as many such slots can be blocked by your graphics card heatsink. Remember that PCI-E cards work in faster slots too, so you could install this card in a x2 or x4 slot.

The DVB-T PE310 is a low-profile card, so it should fit into smaller media centre-style cases. The card uses standard BDA drivers, so it's fully compatible with Windows XP Media Center (MCE) and a great choice if you're building such a system.

If you're not and you want to use the bundled software, you'll be disappointed. After installation, it takes

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you to the analogue scanning tool, even if you want to receive only digital channels. It did find all five analogue channels, though. Once into the application, you can select digital from a drop-down list and scan for Freeview channels. Inexplicably this has to be done twice, once for each tuner, although both of them are running from one RF input. It found all the expected channels, but they were ordered by multiplex with ITV1 first, and there's no way to rearrange them.

Once up and running, the first thing you notice is the ugliness of the interface. You can change the colour of the main window, but it retains its chrome styling. You can open two separate windows to view programmes, each with their own controls. These display any combination of analogue TV, digital TV and FM radio.

You can timeshift two programs simultaneously and manually capture two programmes to your hard disk, although you can't schedule two simultaneous recordings. You can capture analogue video from an S-video or composite source using a breakout cable. There are plenty of capture options, including MPEG 1,2 and 4 at various resolutions.

The EPG is simply a text list of shows and descriptions on the currently selected channel. It doesn't cache information, instead re-acquiring it every time you change channels. You can't schedule recordings from it, either. It's probably the worst EPG we've seen. Simple now and next information would have been more useful.

As a cheap dual tuner card for building an MCE PC it's excellent value. But if you want to use a TV tuner under Windows XP, Terratec's Cinergy 2400i DT is better.