WinFast PVR2000 allows you to enjoy live full-band antenna TV or cable TV programs on your PC. Whenever you feel like listening to FM stereo radio, your PC will serve as one. Built-in !§Hardware MPEG-II Encoder!¨ provides excellent video quality with minimal CPU usage. Bundled with three ULEAD video-editing software, your PC will instantly become a professional and yet, easy-to-use PVR and home entertainment center.

Nice specifications, but let's see the reality.

Inside the box you will find the PCI board, the Remote Control, 2 Batteries, Radio Antenna, IR sensor, Audio cable, 3 Cd's ( Drivers & PVR, Ulead Video Studio 8se, Ulead MovieFactory 3se ), and an Quick Installation Guide.

Mounting was very easy, with an plus for the internal audio connector wich, with the help of the provided Audio Cable can be connected to an auxiliary connector on the Audio Board. The advantage is that there is no external audio conection, all is done inside the computer case.

As for TV Tuners is recomended to use the latest drivers and software, I've download them from the Leadtek site. Latest drivers are MCE certified. Installing was not an problem, once detected by the Add Hardware Wizard is enough to give the path. Also the PVR software was not an problem, but you should select English as install language. Some versions start in Basque.

Once installed, you must set the channels for the TV tuner and radio. I found there an small problem for the radio - you should select an sensivity of 2, or even 3 to detect all the radio station. But that could gives you duplicates, wich you can remove later. Using an lower sensitivity will make it skip some stations.

Also for the TV tuner is an small problem, if you chose your Country, you may have the surprise to skip some frequencies when auto-searching. That depends on the Country you live... For Europe, I recommend you to chose Germany, if your Country use PAL sistem, as this country use the full frequency band.

I have to mention that PVR application use the registry to save information such TV Channels. If reinstalling the operating sistem you have to scan again, unless you know enough to export the registry entries into an "reg" file to use later.

Everything set, let's run it. Nothing to say about quality, image and sound are very good. The last generation 10 bits Connexant chipset does his work perfectly. There is no comparation with an "classic" BT878 chipset. I've test also the Hardware MPEG-II Encoder, wich works fine - I found no difference between the resources used when receiving an TV Station or when Recording it.

However, I've found an problem: when recording you are still able to change the channels. It's an software problem, the guys from Leatdek says is intentionally made to let the user changing the channels if he want that. Unfortunatelly, this cannot prevent an accidentally change of the recorded TV channel.

An other problem found, hardware this time, was an defective IR Sensor. That could be considered as an accident, but I was not the only one with this problem. So I've decided to mention it. In what consist the problem ? Seems that some IR Sensors have an higher sensivity than normal. Because of that, they could receive fake signals, and you may notice that your TV tuner has change the channel, or try to close the computer, without to touch the Remote Control. However, it seems that the problem was solved for the TV tuners manufactured later.

As the software provided with the tuner has some limitation, I've try also other TV Tuner software, like DScaler and Chris TV. But, the best results are obtained with Winfast PVR. DScaler ofers almost the same quality, can read the station name from teletext - if exist, and display it ( Winfast PVR offers only the possibility to manually add the station name. ), but cannot use the Hardware Encoding. Chris TV even if considered as one of the best, offers an bad image quality reported to other two. Perhaps in the future it will be fully compatible with the PVR 2000 tuner and enable also Hardware Encoding - the first steps are already done for this.

All tests done, more or less, there are the final results:

As an conclusion, it's an good product, with fair price, considering the Tuner capabilities and the Software bundled. The weakness of the product is the PVR aplication provided, but this could be improved in future updates..