said by b10010011:said by fifty nine:That's changing. It used to be that you could only get a Cablecard tuner as part of a whole new PC from HP and others. Now Cablelabs loosened the restrictions so that you can pop a cablecard tuner into any old PC.
Sure but do the math.
four-tuner version of the card somewhere between $300 and $600. (so lets say $200-$300 for a two tuner version)
A PC powerful enough to record two HD streams while playing back an HD recording is going to be in the $1000+ range as none of these cards have hardware encoders for HD recording.
A Tivo-HD with lifetime subscription is about $700 and even less if you catch a sale.
The specs listed on the Ceton website are well below a PC in the $1000+ range and frankly I think they are just being cautious. The system doesn't need to be powerful at all and the cards don't need hardware encoders either. Why?
Because the card is simply recording the stream presented by your cable provider. Your hard drive choice is arguably more important then how powerful a CPU you have, provided said CPU was made sometime with in the past 2 years or so.