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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Card - Especially For The College Student, June 17, 2000
By A Customer
I bought this card on a whim hoping that it could take the place of my television set in my dorm room. Once installed, the interface is very easy to deal with and operation is a breeze - especially with the on-screen remote. I have a Pentium 2 350Mhz w/64 megs of RAM and I would recommend the card to anyone but the most hardcore gamers. Even with my aging computer and limited RAM, I rarely experience slowdowns with todays newest games. Gaming factors aside (Buy a Voodoo 5 if you are interested in gaming only, with money to spend), the card really shines when you start using the TV features. I have a DVD player and a VCR player hooked up to mine and it works wonderfully. The Audio/Video pod included make hook-ups a breeze. It accepts both composite video (my VCR) and S-video type type connectors (my DVD player). I wasn't expecting much but the quality has been fantastic. Especially the picture quality with the DVD player. It runs full screen perfectly and my 17" monitor delivers a far better picture than an average television set. Dorm room cable has never looked so great either. It has a hook-up for cable or Broadcast television right on the back of the card. Another nifty feature is the built-in FM tuner. I have it hooked up to a TV antenna stuck under my bed and it picks up radio signals much better than my 400 dollar Kenwood receiver (even in the dorms!). Just an added bonus. I have used it to record a few shows and to my surprise, the quality wasn't bad. Voodoo recommends a fast computer (faster than mine) for capturing video in high quality. For the limited number of times I have used it, it has worked fine. Ok - here comes the lack of that fifth star. The card doesn't have a build-in cooling fan and it runs HOT. I contacted Voodoo about the heat and they said the card was built to handle it. While I have never noticed any of the normal overheating affects associated with video cards, I didn't want to risk damaging any hardware like my motherboard. Another negative is the fact that I have to get out of my bed to change channels (no remote!). Overall, what used to be a computer, stereo, and television set is now just a computer - a faster gaming computer at that.
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