HTPC Owners, please, suggestions.

I had bought a Diamond 650 PCIe TV Tuner back when they were on sale at woot.com.

I guess you get what you pay for. Drivers never did work well with Windows 7, and I get IRQ conflict errors even after they finally made a Windows 7 driver. After searching high and low, I have not found any results or fixes. Maybe ATI tuners just don't like Nvidia.

Ok, so I would like a good list of TV tuner cards that work that you have NEVER had a problem with. In the past I used Haupauge TV tuners (always had problems), Sabrent TV tuner (again, problems) and now ATI Diamond. All have been budget cards, so like I said, I probably got what I paid for.

Could somone recommend a good tuner card with 0 problems, or am I plagued to always have problems? Said card should include excellent media software and hopefully be Sub 100 dollars, Sub 50 would be better.

I'm using a Hauppage 1250 in my HTPC and so far I haven't had any problems in W7 HP. I don't use the included software or remote (I use W7 media center and a BT keyboard) so I can't comment on included software. Have you tried ATI's tech support? Maybe they have a beta driver you can try.

Yeah, I have tried ATI support, and being that this is an old model I guess and only recently (January) got a Windows 7 driver, it tends to glitch or BSOD my system. It doesn't like to play well, so I had to uninstall it.

Brutal-Force said:

Could somone recommend a good tuner card with 0 problems, or am I plagued to always have problems? Said card should include excellent media software and hopefully be Sub 100 dollars, Sub 50 would be better.

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Hmm, is that all?

I've used Avermedia's Duet (A188) and M780 models and also a Hauppage 2250. All have worked well enough as long as signal strength was reasonable. When it's not, they don't. Apparently the A188 suffers from a "disappear after wake-from-sleep" problem on some mobos+Win7. I've never seen the problem myself. I've never used anything but WMC as capture/watch software so can't comment on the packaged media software that comes with them. I've seen reviews of the Avermedia's which say it's poor. You'd probably be better off with WMC if you're capturing DTV.

You could consider an SD HDHomeRun which I hear is extremely reliable. Since it doesn't go in a PCIe slot or need hardware drivers to support it that makes sense. It's somewhat out of your sub-$100 criteria though. Of the PCIe cards it's also going to depend on what signals you need to capture. Do you need a combo digital+analog like the Diamond and/or multiple simultaneous tuners?

Just a single OTA Digital Tuner. I don't really do any capturing, but time sync would be nice.