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In the past, ATI
has outfitted the All-In-Wonder products with slower memory
and a down-clocked processing core, relative to its
premiere enthusiast card. The trend changed when the
All-In-Wonder RADEON 8500 debuted. Like its gaming
counterpart, that particular All-In-Wonder product was set to operate at
275/275MHz and came equipped with 128MB of RAM. Now,
ATI is trying to set up a similar situation with the
All-In-Wonder RADEON 9700 Pro. From what we've heard, retail
cards will feature a 325MHz core and 128MB of DDR memory set
to run effectively at 620MHz. The outcome is a 2.6
gigapixel per second fill rate.
Since the RADEON
9700 Pro and All-In-Wonder RADEON 9700 Pro share the same
core, the two boards will also share a very similar
specification sheet. Be sure to read
our
review of the RADEON
9700 Pro for the complete analysis. Briefly, both 9700
Pro products are built around a 107 million transistor R300 chip,
manufactured on a .15-micron process and mounted using Flip
Chip Ball Grid Array (FC-BGA) packaging. Eight
parallel pipelines process pixel data, while four
programmable vertex shader engines allow up to 325 million
triangles per second to be rendered. Equally
impressive, the DX9-compliant R300 processor is mated to a
256-bit memory bus, which, running at 310MHz, is able to
deliver a staggering 19.8GB per second of bandwidth to the
chip.
The card itself
is AGP 4x/8x compatible. Early in the RADEON 9700's
lifespan, it was discovered that certain AGP 8x motherboard
wouldn't work properly with the card. We discussed this
with ATI
directly and were assured none of these specific issues will affect
the All-In-Wonder RADEON 9700 Pro.
Since the AGP port itself doesn't supply enough power to the chip,
the All-In-Wonder RADEON 9700 Pro sports a four-pin
header that interfaces with the same power connector used
for floppy drives. The back plate houses four
connectors: a DVI-I output (which is adaptable for analog
VGA output), a connector for the video output break-out box,
a connector for video input and a standard CATV connector
for an antenna/cable hook-up. The All-In-Wonder's only
obvious drawback is its single VGA output. Sure, the
card can be connected to a TV and monitor simultaneously,
but many people would undoubtedly find an additional VGA
output useful.
Theater 200
One of the most
notable upgrades from the All-In-Wonder 8500 is the Theater
200 companion chip, which succeeds the Rage Theater.
In its time, the Theater offered crisp video output and
support for an S/PDIF pass-through to a Dolby Digital
decoder. The chip entered production in early 1999
though, so the new Theater 200 offers a refreshing list of
updated specifications. To begin with, ATI has added stereo
audio processing. Also, the Theater 200 sports 12-bit
ADC's, which ATI claims improves both video and audio
performance. ATI has incorporated its third
generation comb filter for improved composite image quality.
Logistically, the Theater 200 chip is ideal for ATI as it
not only supports NTSC, but also PAL, and SECAM formats.
The Software
Part of what
makes the All-In-Wonder such a useful card is its
well-integrated software suite. With each hardware revision, ATI dedicates significant time to updating their
Multimedia Center package consisting of the TV Player,
DVD Player, VCD Player, CD Player, File Player, Multimedia
Center Library and GUIDE Plus+ for TV listings. With
the release of version 8.0, ATI has added a couple of new
features. Mainly, by adding a TV Wonder PCI card,
Picture in Picture can be enabled. And since the
devices are independent, a TV stream can be watched while
another is recorded. This mulTView technology does
require an additional TV card though, so it will probably
not be used as widely as ATI would hope. Also, ATI has
given the name THRUVIEW to the video transparency effect
that debuted with the All-In-Wonder RADEON 8500DV. The
feature has been expanded though, to include TV, DVD and
file playback. Finally, VideoSoap helps improve the quality
of low bit-rate video using a de-noise algorithm and other
real-time effects.
The TV Player,
which has always been a straight-forward application, now
appears even easier to use. Shows captured using the
Personal Video Recorder (PVR) feature, are no longer
obscurely named. Instead, the user is given an option
for file naming. Any combination of record time,
channel number, date, program name, and connector can be
used in order to identify a recording. The captured
video can then be filtered using Video Soap to improve the
quality of the capture. Should you be interested in a
particular word or phrase from a captured show, you can
search the close captioned database and playback will begin
at the section of the stream. Future recordings can be
scheduled on a daily, weekly, yearly or one-time basis, using
the Scheduling Wizard.
The
Package and Conclusion
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