Software Bundle

There are three major parts to the software bundle of the All-In-Wonder VE.

ATi Multimedia Center

The MMC is the cornerstone of the package, providing everything from music playback, to DVD, to VCD, to television. It is from here that all your options that the card supports is available.

Of interest is the television aspect of the MMC. When you set everything up, the first thing you'll want to do is start the television Initialization Wizard.

You go through a series of options. You'll need to select the country and the type of coax connection you'll be using to watch TV.

It takes a minute or so to scan the channel grid and afterwards, it's just a matter of setting up the default format of how you want to record shows and parental control.

Guide Plus+

If TiVo functionality is what you want, Guide Plus+ is about as close as you'll get for the PC. From here, you can preview shows, set up recording schedules, and see what'll be on later that day or week. Every few days, the program will need to download the latest schedule, which is a bit of an annoyance if you haven't fired up Guide Plus+ in a couple of weeks.

You're provided with a lot of information, from program descriptions, to the type of show, and the actors. If you were looking for a reason not to resubscribe to TV Guide, this is it.

Pinnacle Studio 8.4

For the aspiring Speilbergs, ATi packages Pinnacle Studio 8.4, which is an easy to use video editing software. It's not at the level of Adobe Premiere, but for casual directors, you can be editing Uncle Joe out of your home videos in no time.

A video editing card is no good if it doesn't help the CPU out in encoding a video. I captured an episode of Futurama (about 20 minutes), and proceeded to encode it into MPEG-2 format. It ended up taking close to 83 minutes. On an AiW 8500DV, the same file took 86 minutes, so it would appear that the Theater 200 and Cobra Engine do improve encoding times slightly.

Test Setup

Epox 8RDA+ nForce2: Athlon XP 2400+ provided by (15x133: 2.0GHz), 2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700 Ram, ATi All-In-Wonder VE, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.0, ATi Catalyst 3.0

Benchmarks

In an ideal world, I'd run the VE against a 7500 All-In-Wonder, but we don't have any in the labs. We'll be running the AiW VE against itself. All benchmarks are at default settings, unless otherwise noted. I am not including any high quality benchmarks for a couple reasons. First off, they'll just end up scoring lower than the benchmarks being done today, but that is a given. Secondly, any serious gamer who does turn up the eye candy will probably opt for the higher end AiW 9700 Pro.