nVidia Personal Cinema FX5700

eVGA.com's 128MB nVidia Personal Cinema FX5700 aims to do an amazing thing: Turn your PC into a 3D game-playing, TV-watching, VCR-recording, PVR-time-shifting, FM-radio-playing superbox. ATI has been the longtime leader in this category with its All-in-Wonder, and nVidia still has a way to go before usurping the crown. The key is smoothly integrated software, and eVGA.com and nVidia get a decidedly mixed report card on this count.

The Personal Cinema FX5700's digital video recorder (DVR) lets you pause live TV and easily set up recurring recordings to get all episodes of your favorite shows. You can also watch recorded shows on any PC on your home network. An FM tuner lets you record radio, too. S-video and composite video inputs make it possible to capture video from an analog camcorder, and you can remove all those shots of your shoes with the included Ulead DVD MovieFactory 2.5 SE and VideoStudio 7 SE video-editing software.

nVidia's DVR and TV application, ForceWare Multimedia, makes its debut in this product. Here nVidia combines the PVR, TV, FM, and DVD-player applications into a single interface. Strangely, when Windows boots up, you're launched into eVGA.com's user interface, which is designed to be read on a TV. When you press the TV or DVD buttons on the included RF remote control, you're then jarringly shifted into the ForceWare Multimedia app. What's missing is an integrated environment that switches smoothly between contexts. This is important for your less-technical family members.

We tested the Personal Cinema using an analog cable-TV feed, where it performed fairly well, though we ran into audio problems. When we enabled time shifting, which allows live TV to be paused and then played in a delayed mode, the audio and video were severely out of sync. Disabling time shifting solved the problem, but that's not an acceptable solution. We took out the Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS in our test system and swapped in an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card, and it worked fine—but then we lost audio completely when we disabled time shifting.

It took 4 to 5 seconds to change from one channel to the next—painfully slow when you're used to TV's instant response. The nVidia remote control also has limited operating range: It was ineffective when more than about 8 feet from the receiver.

Our final analysis: ATI's All-in-Wonder 9600 XT still holds the advantage, as it has tighter software integration and better 3-D gaming capabilities.