With PCI-Express equipped motherboards now becoming far more prominent in the market place these days, it's only a matter of time before the ole' PCI standard is looked upon in a similar light to the prehestoric ISA ages. However, what good is PCIe if companies arn't providing products to support it?

Video card wise, we certainly haven't anything to worry about with full 16x PCIe support across the board nowadays, but what about all the other PCIe devices many are still waiting upon such as soundcards, RAID 0/1/5 controller cards, gigabit network cards, and others of that nature? Unfortunately there isn't much happening in this area just yet as we play the waiting game for companies to fully adopt the new higher throughput/less limiting interface and start hitting the markets with superior PCIe equivilents of their products.

Avermedia have made the right step at the right time I believe, with an announcement coming in today from Intel's Developer Forum in Taipei which details their move towards PCIe with a couple of new TV tuner cards (one of which was introduced back in September at IDF in San Francisco). The well featured AverTV ExpressCard (E508) is aimed at smaller notebook and SFF PCs, whilst their just launched AverTV PCI Express Dual (M1A3) is a "hardware" based dual-tuner offering which allows one to minimize CPU usage whilst recording a particular channel and watching another simultaneously.

The full scoop on these new PCIe based TV tuners in Avermedia's supporting PR folks.

The new AverTV PCI Express Dual (M1A3) also demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum, employs two TV Tuners which allow users to watch one channel while recording another simultaneously. The M1A3 also incorporates two hardware video encoders reducing the loading onto the CPU. You can simply watch TV without any interruption whilst working on a PC.

"AVerMedia has been committed to developing cutting edge video and multimedia products. We are pleased to have developed the ExpressCard and the new PCI Express TV Tuner products. To be able to support Intel's new solutions with these innovative TV tuner solutions is really exciting," said Dr. J. Allan Yang, CTO of AVerMedia.

In order to be a total PCTV solution provider, AVerMedia will roll out a series of products with ExpressCard's form factor in 2005, such as a 34mm DVB-T ExpressCard, a 54mm Hybrid ExpressCard, a 54mm MCE ExpressCard and a 34mm ATSC ExpressCard.