Gigabyte GC-PTV-TAF review

Gigabyte's GC-PTV-TAF is a hybrid TV tuner - it can receive both digital Freeview and analogue signals.

Before you get excited, this doesn't mean that you can watch an analogue channel while recording a Freeview channel - you can only use one tuner at a time.

This rather defeats the point of having dual tuners. The only people who might conceivably benefit are those who live on the border of a Freeview area and who get good Freeview reception on some channels but not on others. Flicking between digital and analogue reception is easy and only takes a few seconds, so you could quite easily watch one channel on digital and then flick over to another on analogue.

If you do use the card like this, be prepared to notice just how awful analogue TV now looks compared with Freeview broadcasts. In our tests, Freeview programmes were crisp, clean and bright with perfect contrast and colour balance. Analogue pictures by comparison were washed out and a bit fuzzy, although quality will vary from region to region.

For anyone who doesn't live on the very border of a Freeview area, this is an ordinary single-tuner card. Happily, it's quite a good ordinary single-tuner card. It's easy to install, everything worked first time and the excellent bundled CyberLink PowerCinema application found all the available channels in a single scan that just took a few minutes. The remote control that comes with the card works perfectly too, turning your PC into something like a proper TV. Recording programs was also straightforward, though annoyingly, you can't schedule recordings in the electronic program guide. PowerCinema allows you to organise and watch your recordings, as well as any other music and video files on your PC - it basically works just like Windows Media Center. You even get a DVD authoring program for burning your recordings to DVD.

There were a couple of things that annoyed us. The built-in FM tuner could only find one radio station, and when we changed TV channels the picture monetarily froze. Generally, though, this was a very good TV tuner, even if most people will only really use either the digital or the analogue function, not both.