ATI's Best: All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 128MB & TV/Capture Card Roundup

Matrox's Marvel G450 eTV

Matrox started the trend of putting together 3D gaming cards with TV tuners and video capture devices. The Matrox Marvel line has had a strong following although we haven't seen a new product in the line for over a year now.

Click to Enlarge

As the name implies, the Marvel G450 eTV is based on Matrox's Millennium G450 core. By today's standards the G450 core carries no potential as a gaming solution, not able to outperform even a NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Ultra. But as Matrox really opened this market up with their Marvel series it was definitely worth including.

The Marvel G450 eTV was the first card of its kind not to require any external breakout boxes for the input and output ports. A single analog Philips TV tuner was present on the card as well a 10-pin output connector and an 8-pin input connector. Matrox supplied two dongles that split the two connectors into S-Video and RCA inputs and outputs as well as one 1/8" output to the sound card.

The rest of the PCB was a relatively simple design with only a single chip complementing the G450 core and its four DDR SDRAM chips; that single chip is a Samsung made TV encoder chip that also handled video capture. A smaller chip made by Micronas handles the sound processing for TV reception.

Matrox put a considerable amount of effort into the development of their PC-VCR software. The PC-VCR interface is extremely easy to use and serves as the sole conduit for watching TV and capturing live TV to your computer.

The software allows you to encode directly to MPEG-2 files but unfortunately only offers three resolutions to record at: 352x240, 352x480, 704x480. As if that weren't constraining enough, Matrox only offers three bit rates to encode with - SLP: 0.63 MB/s, LP: 0.83 MB/s and SP: 1.02 MB/s. It's clear that the PC-VCR wasn't intended for heavy use and can't match up to some of the newer offerings from ATI and NVIDIA.