| Product: |
Asus V 9520 Home Theater |
| Date: |
20.02.04 (2013 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: None that I can see
Disadvantages: unable to do what it claims to do
I recently purchased the V9520. So far, I've regretted that mistake. I was looking for a card that would allow me to transfer some VHS tapes to DVD. According to the advertisements, this card makes it easy. So far, that's been a BIG lie.
My first experience with that product was that if I tried to use any packages that could capture video from a WDM device other than the software that shipped with the product, the programs wouldn't recognize the card. I contacted Asus tech support and was told that I needed to download the current WDM drivers from NVidia, not the ones on their site since they aren't current. Apparently Asus doesn't believe in keeping up with the driver updates for the product lines they sell. Great way to run a business.
Once I finally got the current drivers, my capture software recognized the card. I used a program called VirtualVCR to do the capture. The program keeps statistics such as dropped frames, etc. I did that because all the attempts I made to capture movies with the bundled software results in the audio being severely out of synch with the video. The VirtualVCR package statistics revealed that about 10% of the frames from the movie were being dropped.
If I had a low end PC I could understand this. If it was only happening on 1 or 2 tapes, it could be blamed on tape quality. If I was using an old VCR, I could blame it on that. However, none of these things is true. The PC being used is a brand new 3GHZ P4 hyperthreaded with Windows XP Media Edition at the current service pack. The computer has 1 GBT of memory and dual 160 BGT Serial ATA drives. If that's not enough hardware to keep up, and I'm running the capture by itself, I don't know what is! I also tried several different tapes - same result every time within a percent or 2. Since I didn't want to keep hauling a VCR back and forth fro my TV room to my office, I bought a brand new VCR for this too.
In summary, I'd have to say this product completely sucks. If there are settings in the drivers that need to be done to correct this, why isn't that made readily apparent to the users of the product? For that matter, the very fact that users can't even rely on Asus to keep current drivers on their website shows their complete lack of attention to their product line.
Summary:
|
Last comment:
 |
Dave_UK - 20.02.04 A shame that you had such a bad experience. However, I have rated this review SU because it tells us absolutely nothing about the specs or features of the card - speed, chipset, software, cooling etc are all missing here. The only thing that you do mention is the Video-In functionality, which seems to be the focus of the entire review.
It is unlikely that the sync problems you were getting are the fault of Asus, given that the chipset is manufactured by nVidia.
In addition, you make a big fuss that Asus don't keep their site drivers up-to-date.
Of course, drivers are going to be quickest from the source, nVidia. It is standard practise to download the latest drivers straight from nVidia, rather than Asus themselves. Asus know this, so they just provide tested reference drivers on their site.
Tomshardware.co m readers voted Asus as the best videocard manufacturer - so I feel that many of your comments are completely unfounded.
I suggest you make sure that all your other drivers are up to date, and that their are no config problems in the rest of your PC.
In particular make sure your motherboard drivers are up to date, and that no programs (antivirus etc) are running while you input your video.
Dave. |
|
