Over the past year there has been a change in the video card performsnce war. Where nVidia had previously lead in this area for the past few years, both with their top of the line cards and their lower end cards, now they had to give the performance crown to ATi. It was with the release of the ATi Radeon 9700 in the middle of last year that ATi took the performance lead from nVidia.  Currently the Radeon 9800 and the nVidia GeForce FX are battling for the rights as fastest video card.

    However not everyone can or even wants to be able to afford the absolute 'fastest' video card out there. This is the reason that these slower video cards sell much better than many other video cards. So upon the release of the Radeon 9700 ATi also released their new low end chip, the Radeon 9000. This card while slower than the 9700/9500 still offered acceptable performance for many games.

    Recently the lines between TV and computers was blurred a bit more with the release of Windows XP Media Edition. With this OS a computer became a TV, DVD Player, CD/MP3 player, as well as a computer. This isn't necessarily new as ATi has been making the AiW series for at least 4 or 5 years. Today's review will look at one of ATi's latest but not necessarily fastest All-in-Wonder video cards.

ATi Radeon All-In-Wonder 9000 Pro

    How does ATi present this latest All-In-Wonder?  What comes with it, does it have a bundle somewhat like an MSI video card or is it more like a run of the mill OEM video card?  Lets allow the following pictures to show what the video card and box look like, as well as what kind of bundle is included.  If you would like to take a look at the ATi specifications of this card please for more information, though we will discuss many features in our review.

• AIW 9000Pro

• Users manual, Support information, and quick connection guide (very useful)

• SVHS output cable with SVHS, RCA, TV-Tuner audio out (to line-in), and digital audio out connector

• Video-in Box with SVHS, RCA video and stereo audio in connectors

• DVI-VGA adaptor

• ATi Driver CD

• Pinnacle Studio 8.1

• ATi Remote Wonder and manual

• 4*AA batteries

The Card - Continued

    The box ATi decided to package the video card in is fairly is nothing to fancy, but still provides enough color so that you can notice it on store shelves.  The design of the video card itself is not as flashy as other cards that we have reviewed, such as the MSI Ti4600-8X which sported both a red PCB and a slightly more exotic cooling system.  The card, as the name suggests sports a TV-Tuner which is a Phillips version.  This provides one of the main attracting features of this card, being able to watch TV on your computer.

    The outputs on the back of the card consist of (from top to bottom), video/audio-in from the ATi breakout box, the TV Tuner, video/audio-out with the supplied output cable, and the DVI port which can be used as a VGA port with the supplied adaptor.  The TV-in/out is handled by ATi's Rage Theater 200 chip which is found on most of ATi's newer video cards.  This brings many features which we will discuss in slightly more detail later.  

    The Remote Wonder, which has been reviewed previously by Hubert, is a nice addition to the package.  Since it was reviewed we will not go into detail about this feature.  The remote worked very well, and the inclusion of the batteries was a good idea.  I have actually used this accessory a fair bit, especially for watching TV, and not necessarily using the ATi TV software.  The plug-in for Winamp was a welcome addition as this makes it easier to switch songs from across the room.  I did find that when in the ATi TV program sometimes the channel control didn't work properly, rather I had to use the up/down arrows to change channels.  The programmable buttons, all six of them, were useful especially when switching from one tuner to another in the ATi TV software (more on that later).

    The manuals included in the package are good, and the quick connect page is very nice if you need to remember which cable connects where.  The full manual covers all the points of setting up you video card, from installing it, to capturing video with it.  Unlike other manufacturers that make one manual for all of a large series, ATi has made this manual for only the AiW Radeon 9000 series (AGP and PCI), which means that while it looks smaller than other manuals, it actually has more relevant information about the product.

Software    

    The software package is rather small but provides what you need to get started in using the AiW.  Pinnacle Studio is a nice program that provides a time-line or video based approach to video editing, depending on what you prefer.  Of course there is the ever present ATi Multimedia Center which provides TV, DVD, Audio CD, Video CD, and assorted other small features with it.  One other program included with the card is the GemStar TV guide program, which allows you to check on the shows for an entire week and pick which ones you want to record, though I didn't find this program to be extremely useful as it didn't work all that well for me.  But lest now look at ATi's Multimedia Center.

    Multimedia Center is broken down into multiple smaller, specific programs, such as the DVD player, the CD Audio player, the File player, the TV player (only with TV Tuners), and the Library.  Overall these programs all work well with the AiW 9000 as its hardware decoding supported by the the DVD player is a bonus.  Lets just take a brief look at the TV part of the Multimedia Center.

    Some of the features of this part of the ATi software are that it can have full screen video or a video desktop; it also has the nice Thruview display mode as well, where you can watch TV while still doing other things right over top of the video.  The AiW 9000 Pro, unlike the TV Wonder products, can capture in this program at 720*480 which is DVD resolution.  Capturing in MPEG-2 with the DVD preset gave good quality video which didn't have any dropped frames on a Barton 2500+.  Closed captions are also a big plus in this program as other TV viewing software doesn't show the closed captions, which I personally like to watch, especially if the volume is turned down, or I'm using a different computing for sound.  Another very interesting feature is MulTView, which is basically your standard PiP on many TV's today.  As we can see in the picture above this allows for watching of multiple shows at once, though you will only hear the audio for the window that has the focus on it.  So you can watch a show and check the listings for what's on next.  The only downside to MulTView is that, when I tested it with the WinTV Go it didn't work, however it did with the TV Wonder.

    How about the video editing software, Pinnicle Studio?  The program itself is fairly easy to use, and capturing is simple to do with the AiW 9000 Pro.  Once you get into the editing you have a choice of a timeline based editing or a storyboard based editing style.  I myself am partial to the timeline based approach so most of the screenshots will show this.  

    An interesting feature of the software is that with any video you import, or even capture, you can have the program try and detect the changes in scene and create a new start frame, based on this.  However if you have video that is constantly changing like in the picture above, then this can be a problem with over 49 pages of what it believes is scene changes in a half hour of video.  Another sore point about this package is that it is limited to a maximum resolution of 1024*768, even if the screen has a higher resolution.  

    The following picture is a sample of the final rendering as well as the maximum resolution of the program.

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.