Physical examination
The H900 ships in a fairly large box, but when you actually get inside...
...the card itself is low-profile.
The metallic component labelled H900 is the signal receiver, which is much more compact than earlier analogue tuners. On the top-right of the board there are two 2-pin headers. One of these connects to the motherboard's power-switch header, while the chassis power-switch cable connects to the other. This allows the H900 to turn the PC on of its own accord, providing the 5V standby voltage is present (i.e. the PSU is plugged in).
Here is the Conexant encoder chip, which is accompanied by two 16MiB memory chips. That gives the card enough processing power and memory to take the incoming analogue signal and turn it into an MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 stream. MPEG-4 is supported, but only through software.
The rear of the card has a warning covering what to do if PC starts turning on and off of its own will. If, for some reason, the H900's 'turn-on' circuitry has a problem of some kind, it seems it might get stuck in a loop, which can be fixed by completely removing power to the system. Also on this side of the board is labelling for the power pins, despite said pins being around the front.
The I/O backplane has connections for a coaxial aerial cable, FM antenna, IR-connector and mini-DIN for breakout cabling.
There's a pretty healthy bundle with the H900. Starting at the top-left and working down through the cabling, we have an FM antenna, then a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm audio cable which is for connecting the tuner to the line-in on a soundcard if, for some reason, audio cannot be sent over the PCI bus. Next is the power connector for hooking the card up to the motherboard, followed by the infrared receiver. In the bottom package is a low-profile PCI bracket, an adapter for the card's aerial connector and a breakout cable with audio-in and -out along with S-Video and composite video inputs.
In the middle we have the remote control for the card along with two AAA batteries to power it. It's fairly light and has a reasonably good layout, although there's quite a distance between the top and bottom of the controller; not good if you have a stubby thumb.
On the right is the manual, and on top of it is the comprehensive software bundle that includes Ulead VideoStudio 9 SE and DVD MovieFactory 4 SE and the Compro software CD which features Compro's PVR and FM software, plus PhotoExplorer 8.5 SE.
Initial thoughts
Looking at the hardware and bundle, Compro appears to have put a comprehensive package together, covering all bases. A low-profile card makes the product ideal for media center PCs and the extra power-on capabilities of the card look suited to the same scenario, too.
