Drivers/Overclocking
ATi has made great strides in its drivers over the past few years, and their present driver package called Catalyst, has proven to be very stable and fast. But what features are provided by the drivers, well lets see a couple of the more important ones.
The OpenGL and Direct 3D panels allow you to do almost the same thing, increase the antialiasing levels, as well as the ansiotropic filtering levels. You have your choice of manual settings, or you can choose between quality and performance settings. The AA level goes up to 6X but that only works on the AiW 9000 64 MB at 800*600. The ansiotropic filtering goes all the way up to 16X which is higher than the other cards tested today. Moving on the the Overlay Adjustments panel, we see one of the more important options if you want to watch video on your TV, that of Theater mode, which much like DVD Max on Matrox video cards, outputs video full screen to your TV. Lastly there is the Display panel, which allows you to select the monitors you want to enable, and in the case of the AiW 9000 Pro you get the choice of either the Monitor or the Flat Panel Device and the TV.
Overclocking has been a favorite pastime of many people who want the most out of there equipment. The video card has adequate cooling and is connected to the card via a thermal pad, while the (600MHz DDR), which is slightly above the stock memory speed of 270MHz (540MHz DDR). So how well does this card overclock? Lets see the highest overclock I was able to get out of our sample, and remember that results will vary between cards.
Yes we only managed a 25MHz improvement for the core speed and a 30MHz improvement for the memory. While this isn't that bad, about a 9-11% increase, it pales in comparison to the MSI GeForce 4 MX that I tested previously. But a card can be overclocked as much as you would like, but does it show any improvement in benchmarks, we will soon find out, but first lets look at the quality of the card.
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ATI All-In-Wonder 9000 Pro: ATi has been making the AiW series for the last several years. Today's review will look at one of ATi's latest but not necessarily fastest All-in-Wonder video card.
