Pinnacle PCTV Dual DVB-T Pro PCI 2000i review

in April, we reviewed the Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT, the first TV card with two tuners, allowing you to record one channel while watching another.

After months of dominating the dual-tuner market, the Terratec finally has some competition in the shape of Pinnacle PCTV Dual DVB-T PCI Pro 2000i.

The Pinnacle costs the same as the Terratec, but it fits into a standard PCI slot rather than a PCI-Express slot. The minimum requirements for this card are high, though - a 2GHz Pentium 4 processor and 256MB of RAM.

The supplied Pinnacle Media Centre software guides you through setup and automatically scans for available channels, but it isn't well implemented. Its most irritating characteristic is that it's split into two separate tools that cannot run at the same time. So, you can watch TV and set up recordings in the Pinnacle Media Centre, but you have to exit the TV application and start up the Media Centre settings program to access all the software's settings.

Picture quality was crystal clear with natural colours and enough detail to go full screen, as long as you watched only one channel at a time, that is. Using the picture-in-picture function, however, slowed down the frame rate, causing the video to jerk and stutter. Picture quality also suffered when we tried to record and watch TV at the same time. This could be because our PC wasn't powerful enough, but it was within the card's minimum specifications.

We were rather excited by the Pinnacle PCTV Dual DVB-T Pro PCI 2000i when we first heard about it - it has lots of good features and looked like it might bring dual-tuner technology to all the people who don't have PCI-Express slots in their PCs. But sadly, the poor performance of the card when both tuners were in use and the frustrating software mean that it fell well short of our expectations.