CPU Strain/AIW
 

I am thinking about getting an AIW from ATI. Does anyone know how much system resources are taken away just from watching television (not recording) on your computer. I have a Dell 8300 2.6HT P4, 1.25G of 3200 RAM and hopefully a 9600AIW. Does anyone know or have used such a card? Thanks for any info or data.

A few years back i had an older AIWPro card, i think it was when i was running a Celeron 300a / 128megs or so? Anyways, TV ran smoothly no matter what i was doing.

i cant tell you in too much techical detail exactly what is going on, but i do beleive that all of the processing required to put the television signal into your application is done within the video card, so no real external processing power is required.

With you system you wont notice a bit of difference when playing tv. Its very smooth, and doesnt hinder the cpu very much. As junglistic mentioned the encodingg/decoding is done on card.

I've got the AIW 9600 Pro and I don't notice any slowdown at all.

I just checked, and running fullscreen on my P4 2.0Ghz it took less than 1% of the resources shown by taskmanager. It actually stayed a 0% most of the time.