Creative Labs 3D Blaster Personal Cinema

Review CREATIVE LABS IS ONE OF NVIDIA'S FAVORITE PETS. The company and its 3D blaster brand are well known in the 3D graphics world, not to mention the Creative audio family of products where the company gained recognition from the time of original Sound Blaster cards.

Creative labs won one quite sweet agreement with Nvidia last autumn which gives the company the exclusive right to sell its Personal Cinema boards on the old continent.

Nvidia have an interesting marketing model where differing partners get all different rights to build some kind of product. Elsa, for example, has the right to build professional Quadro branded cards and no other company can build that solution. Since the main focus of Nvidia interest is the gaming market covering all segments, each partner can build TI and MX cards but there are still some prioritizing in that Nvidia prefers partners that are quick on the draw and bring product earlier to market.

One of those agreements is that Personal Cinema in Europe can be built only by Creative labs and no other company. The same product in the US is manufactured by Visiontek and in Asia by relatively unknown Compro. Compro made the first reference design samples for Nvidia.

In Europe, there is just one product based on Personal Cinema called 3Dblaster Personal Pinema powered by Geforce 2 MX 400 card.

What is 3D Blaster Personal Cinema?

Creative Labs' 3DBlaster Personal Cinema kit includes a 3D blaster MX 400 AGP card with 64 Mb RAM and special video out necessary to connect your Geforce 2 MX card to the external AV/TV tuner that we like to call "green box" since it is green. The famous nice green box includes a bushel of Audio and Video ins and outs and of course one of the most valuable parts of this kit the mighty remote control - crown of the whole package.

You also receive illustrated manual for this product as well as interesting and helpful installation manual for your AGP card and all this is in eleven different European languages. You also receive bunch of cables S-video, composite, chinch and audio cable. You will need these cables to connect many devices to the tuner. Creative Labs provides two AAA batteries for your remote control so you don't need anything extra in order to make the kit work from the moment you connect it on your PC.

Installation

Installation procedure is a piece of cake. And , as you will see on most TV tuner cards, after restarting your PC, Windows will install exactly six devices that are necessary to make this product work. You need to install the Geforce 2 MX400 card manually from the CD, however, before installing other applications or Nvidia WDM drivers.

All applications and the Nvidia WDM driver can be installed in one go and it is a nice and easy procedure with just one little hint that drives provided on CD 21.85 and Nvidia WDM drivers are not digitally signed, which will cause you much unnecessary mouse clicking. Anyway after restarting everything was working perfectly for us.

For full functionality you need to install Intervideo Win DVD and Win DVR that are base programs necessary to be able to view TV/DVD or record with your Personal Cinema.

Software

There are three software packages that you receive with this kit. As mentioned before, you receive Intervideo Win DVD, Win DVR and MGI VideoWave 4.0 SE as well with DirectX 8 and acrobat reader and both the Personal Cinema and MX 400 drivers, naturally.

You need Win DVD to be able to watch DVDs and it has full support for the remote control you receive with the kit. Apart of just watching DVDs with this application, you can also watch Video CD 2.0 format and the really great thing is that when you press DVD/CD button on your remote you will start or close this application.

Another really nice thing is that you can navigate through DVD menus with your remote, since is sports all buttons you have on a home DVD player. You can change scenes, subtitles angles or whatever you desire to do.

The second application, WinDVR, enables you to watch TV on your PC and it features a great channel scanner that allows you to manually edit a list of scanner channels and to turn off those with bad reception or the one you simply dislike.

Channel scanning is fast which is handy, since in Europe there are several different TV standards. In Bosnia and many EU countries we use Pal - B standard while the UK and Ireland uses PAL - I. The French use a different standard called Seccam. You should be extra careful when you purchase a TV tuner with these standards issues. The US, of course, uses the NTSC standard and most of those standards mentioned are not compatible.

Videowave 4.0 software helps you edit video you have recorded from your TV or camorder. Well, you can do some basic stuff which will be more than enough for most users and it's a nice extra in this kit.

Recording Video

The mportant part of the Personal Cinema experience for me was how well this device can capture video from TV.

We tried recording video from TV at the highest possible resolution 720x576 which is also the quality that you see on DVDs. This resolution needs a lot of space on your hard drive and you need quite fast machine for this operation.

Nvidia recommends a 933 MHz PIII or AMD equivalent processor for this advanced operation while, for basic functionality you need 400 MHz processor with 128 MB ofRAM< and you chipset drivers installed.

We tested on:

Athlon 2000+

NEC MultiSync FP 1355 22" display

MSI KN420 Pro board with Nforce chipset or Epox 8KHA+ KT266A board

256 Mb DDR266 RAM

Western Digital 40 Gb 5400 HDD

On this configuration we haven't experienced any problems and we were able to record 720x576 video without dropping any frames. This means that you will be able to record movies, videos from your TV or camcorder and edit them or watch later. The quantity of video that can be recorded varies depending on the setting used. You can use predefined settings for video format and quality or you can make your own, its up to you.

3D performance

The Personal Cinema tuner comes with a Geforce 2 MX 400 card so you should not expect state-of-the-art 3D performance. It's still enough for most of the games floating around although you may not be able to run some high resolution and details. This kit is for video feature lovers who may play some games from time to time. We didn't run any benchmark since the card would look bad compared with many of today's cards.

Impression

3D blaster Personal Cinema is an impressive product. It is not so different from engineering samples of this device that we saw at late September 2001 but some things are better implemented in this Creative Labs product.

The Geforce 2 MX 400 may not be fast enough for many gamers but for those who prefer video functionality this card will do nicley. At a price of 249 Euros, (Huh? Ed) excluding VAT, this product will be of interest for everyone requiring a TV tuner or would like to have a remote control on your PC while you watch your DVDs. Some video capture and editing can be done with this kit as well so if you see yourself in these categories this is right thing for you.

There are two things that may make you think again. If you need faster graphics, there should be some Personal Cinema with Geforce 4 MX or even Geforce 4 in future. Secondly, ATI's response to this card are Radeon 8500 and 7500 DV that are great featured cards made and distributed by Hercules in Europe. Those cards are expected on the market really soon. µ