MCE Satellite cards - UK

[MikeJHathaway]

Hi Everyone,

I am just about to start building my very own MCE HTPC and am rather new to the whole topic so am researching loads and asking (probably some very basic/stupid) questions.

I am planning on replacing my sky multi room setup with a HTPC with a couple of dual satellite fed PCIe cards and move my sky card into a Omnikey card reader. I plan on using XBox's as my extenders to achiveve the multi room setup. I waned to see if anyone has some good advice on the best satellite PCIe cards I should be looking at. I have seen threads that talk about the delay that can be seen with channel switching and thought to ask you gurus .

I have seen a Black Gold 3600 DVB-S2 card for £80 and a TBS6981 DVB-S2 for £70 but have seen mixed reviews, I'm also interested in any feedback on the TBS6984 quad card. Any pointers welcome as I don't want to waste money, also what I am looking for should be easy to use as my family will be the first to complain that the setup isn't as fast or easy to use as Sky.

Thanks

Mike

[bobbob]

i'm using the tbs 6984. i've only had it in for a couple of months and i'm not sure i'm completely satisfied with the picture quality yet. need to do some more investigation. channel change time is good for unencrypted channels, but nothing will compare to the sky box. also the omnicard can be a bit hit and miss. i'm not using mine at present

[CyberSimian]

I have seen a Black Gold 3600 DVB-S2 card for £80 and a TBS6981 DVB-S2 for £70 but have seen mixed reviews, I'm also interested in any feedback on the TBS6984 quad card.

I currently have a TBS DVB-T2 quad-tuner card in my HTPC, and have been monitoring the TBS forum over the past few months. Of the problems that have been raised (with both satellite and terrestrial cards), compatibility problems between the card and the motherboard seem to be more common than they should. Apparently, the TBS cards use the PCI-E version 1.0a standard, and this seems to be a standard with which many motherboard manufacturers are not compliant (even though they may support more-recent PCI-E 2.0 and even PCI-E 3.0 standards). So some caution may be in order, especially if you are intending to use an older motherboard which is no longer in production (i.e. for which there will be no more BIOS fixes).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[holidayboy]

I'm running a TBS 6981 (as well as a Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-HD-S2 PCI tuner) for satellite, plus a TBS6280 for Freeview HD.

The TBS cards (and my old faithful Hauppauge one) have been rock solid for me, I did have a Blackgold card (an older BGT3595) but I kept running into tuning issues and never did get to the bottom of it.

It definitely has a lot to do with compatibility with other components as CyberSimian says.

Have you picked out motherboards etc yet?

[milli260876]

I'm also in the tbs camp, 6984 quad tuner replaced my Hauppauge s2 units. Picture quality looks great on mine, although I do think my dvb-t2 looks better on the tv...

[MikeJHathaway]

Thanks for all the responses.

I actually have an old PC I am going to use, it's a HP Pavilion A6000 not sure what board is in there but I have a quad fire PCU with 3GB RAM. I have setup the XBoxes as media extenders and that is all fine, I just need to order up my DVB-S2 cards.

Cheers

Mike