AVerMedia RECentral Live Gamer HD Capture Card Review

After having a little change of scene to what I normally review, I have to say that I’m thoroughly impressed with the Live Gamer HD, not only on the front of its simplicity, but also how well it works whilst not affecting the rest of your systems performance whilst recording. Whilst we used it in the way that was thought of, to capture game play, I’m sure that with a little bit of thought, there could be a whole load of uses for the card to stream more than in game footage onto the internet.

The out of the box recording performance is great, being able to capture straight to 1080p has been high up on a number of peoples wish lists for a little while now, and software based options have not quite been able to match this level of simplicity and quality for some time due to the resources that they take up. Getting the kit setup is a breeze as well, and as long as you’re able to install the card into any free PCIe lane and connect a couble of cables up then you’re going to be laughing in no time.

I think the only little bit extra that I would have liked to see in the box is a short HDMI cable as well as the long one. The reason for this is that if you’re connecting the card to capture from the same system that it is installed into, you don’t want to have a long lenght of cable going would could realistically be a matter of inches, in our case the card was right next to the GPU, so a 4-6″ cable would have been just about right.

On the whole though, I can’t really fault the package that is on offer and for those that want to capture many sources at the same time to stream to the internet, there is even more good news as the software is able to detect multiple cards and use them all at the same time! This is great news for say a gaming team where more than one source is wanted for broadcasting to the internet via Xsplit.

Bottom line, the Live Gamer HD is a great item, its works out of the box, just as it says it would and its simplicity allows you to be up and running in a matter of minutes making it worth every penny.