Windows MCE 2005 Performance

Installation of DualTV MCE was straightforward.  The latest drivers were downloaded off the nVidia site, and installed.  BTW, keep in mind that XP 2005 MCE is the only OS supported out-of-the-box at this time. Other OSes can be made to work with DualTV MCE, but requires third-party software, all of which should be easily found on the web.

The official System Requirements for the DualTV MCE are as follows:

• Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (including Update Roll-up 2)

• 1.6 GHz Intel® Pentium®4, Celeron®, or equivalent AMD® Athlon™ or Sempron™ CPU (2.4 GHz recommended for all CPU)

• 256 MB system memory (512MB highly recommended)

• Available PCI slot

• Graphics with 64MB DDR, DXVA (motion-compensation), and Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 support (128MB DDR recommended)

• 20 GB free space on Ultra DMA (ATA/66) hard disk (40GB or more recommended)

• DirectSound-compatible sound card or integrated audio

• CD-ROM drive (DVD-ROM or DVD recorder drive recommended)

• Microsoft DirectX 9.0 or later

The test platform is as follows:

Once up and running, MCE 2005 worked very well with DualTV as its tuner. 

Here is a full-screen shot of a VHF channel, ch.9.  Time Warner Cable provides the CATV service, and the lower channels usually suffer from more noise.  In this image, grain is noticeable, but this is typical for other analog tuners plugged into this same exact cable:

Below is a CATV channel, ch.67, shown in a window over the XP MCE desktop.  Image quality or frame rate did not suffer while running CPU-intensive operations such as Prime95 or Cinebench.  Also, the image quality of ch.67 was better than that of ch.9, again typical of the incoming cable signal.  However, this does prove that the DualTV MCE extracts the signal very well amidst the digital cable noise present. 

We also tested the FM Radio, and all we can say is, not bad.  Unless the signal is very clean to begin with, multipath FM, noise and hiss are relics ready to be replaced within the next few years by HD Radio.  Many prefer to listen to streaming audio anyways. 

Additional tests were performed, and the results are summarized below:

The Remote control functionality was more of a curiosity than a necessity.  Most serious HTPC users would go for a Logitech Harmony remote instead of the basic one included in the DualTV.  Installation was easy - simply plug in the receiver into the USB port, plug in and place the IR transmitter close to the IR receiver of the set-top box.  Configuration in MCE 2005 took only a bit of time, just like any remote, but when finished, it worked splendidly.  It correctly controlled the Time Warner Cable-provided MOXI set-top box, and allowed us to channel surf and record programs from the digital-only channels (> ch. 100) through the S-VID and Audio inputs.