I debated a good bit before deciding to post in the Hardware forum. If this is more suited for the General forum, please let me know.

I'm planning to buy soon and get into either R5A22 or R5A26. Output will be to a 32" tv (plain old NTSC television with svideo and composite inputs). I've listed my planned purchases below for your edification. My only question: are two PVR-350's overkill? I.e., my goal is to have dual tuning to watch and record simultaneously, and I want the nice output the 350 offers. Is a second 350 overkill in favor of a lesser model number of that series? If you have any other advice to offer, please feel free to emote.

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ / 2 GHz processor $174.99

ANTEC PIANO BLACK QUIET MEDIA CASE (this is the Overture II) $106.45

ASUS Extreme N6200TC/TD - graphics adapter - GF 6200 TC supporting 256MB $60.86

Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 x2 $278.60

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI - mainboard - ATX - nForce4 SLI $192.36

Plextor PX-716A Recordable Drive $122.96

Western Digital Caviar RE WD3200SB - hard drive - 320 GB - ATA-100 $169.97

Tax on above items: $60.53
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Other vendors:

CPU Fan - $41.99 (xpcgear.com) + ?? Shipping, xpcgear Part: CC47ZM70BACL, Total: $41.99+

Northbridge Heatsink - $5.00 (Coolerguys.com) + ?? Shipping, Coolerguys Part: 840556016366, Total: $5.00+

Sound - $25.00 (NewEgg) + $2.50 Shipping, NewEgg Part: N82E16829120103, Total: $27.50

RAM - $73.99 (NewEgg) + $4.81 Shipping, NewEgg Part: N82E16820145440, Total: $78.80

Rough Total: $1,321

Why not the pvr-500? It has a dual tuner so it can act like 2 350's but it cheaper.

I would recommend either a PVR-250 or PVR-150 for your second tuner, you'll be paying a good chunk more for that second decoder, and there'd be no benefit.

I run a 350 for output myself, and haven't tried using a non-PVR card for video out, so I can't speak to the quality difference, I've heard some say that their NVidia cards are almost as good as a 350. If that's the case, you should look into the PVR-500 as your capture card, two tuners on one card.

_________________
-Steve

Slam, the 350 has a true TV out, and it appears (from extensive research of these forums) that it's the best TV out you'll get; hence my decision to go with at least one 350.

Isn't getting an SLI motherboard a bit of overkill for a PVR? Do you need all the extra features or would an nforce 4 (non-sli) chipset do?

It is overkill .. this may not always be a PVR though
Were you thinking more along the lines of an MSI NFORCE4 SOCKET 939 ATX-PCIE X16?

I've done a lot more digging and found some guidance in the forum relating to my 'using multiple PVR350s' query.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=38412&highlight=&

There is no reason to get a second pvr-350. Get one pvr-350 and either a pvr-250 or pvr-500.

My box has one pvr-350 and one pvr-500. Works great.

Thanks Ryan. I like the idea of getting a 500. Three tuners in one box! I'm assuming that I'll need my cable split to run into all three inputs. Got any recommendations on the best way to do this for maximum signal integrity? Hardware recommendation?

I went to home depot and got a high quailty (1-5000MHz if I remember correctly) one-into-four spliter. It feeds my TV, VCR, pvr-350 & pvr-500. The VCR connection isn't really used so a one-into-three spliter would work just as well.

Slight transposition there, the available splitters are typically either 5MHz-1000Mhz (1Ghz) or for the pricier statellite ones 5Mhz-2Ghz.

Other things being equal, each additional tap on a good splitter incurs an extra 3.5 to 3.7db loss. Cheap splitters may suffer a higher loss. Daisy chaining splitters is worse however. So you're better off getting one with the appropriate number of taps. Somewhere beyond 4 taps (and almost certainly certainly if you go beyond 6) you cross the line to needing a powered signal booster.

And be warned that the interference environment inside a PC is pretty bad, so a signal that may look ok connected directly to the TV will probably show all sorts of interference on an analog tuner card. This is where a powered booster can really help you.

Yea that sounds more like it. I was going off memory and I did remember the 5MHz part

danejasho, the PVR 500 has one Cable TV Coax input for both tuners so, you only need a 2-way splitter one input for the 350 and one for the 500.

My Current Setup is

AMD Athlon 800
512 Meg Ram
160 GIG HD
Nvidia TNT2 32 Meg
PVR-350
PVR-500
SoundBlaster Live

Using this setup I can record on 3 channels simultaneously while watching a program I've recorded. Works great. The PVR350 has amazing TV out. Get one!

Don't forget about a direct feed to the TV or other devices... I'm currently splitting the line to get; 1 for the cable modem, 1 direct to the TV, 1 for the PVR-250, and finally 1 for the PVR-150. At some point I want to get the HD-300 card back in there and see if I can't get QAM working off the same feed too...