Product Reviews

ATI's All-in-Wonder cards are great. They combine 3D graphics with a TV tuner, video capture, teletext, a massive software bundle and excellent DVD decoding. For all these reasons, the All-in-Wonder 128 Pro carried off a Recommended award in our October 2000 issue.

However, the All-in-Wonder 128 Pro's one weakness was its less-than-shattering 3D performance. Cue the latest All-in-Wonder card: lurking under its cooling fan is a Radeon graphics accelerator chip - a truly monstrous piece of silicon. We've already seen what a Radeon can do: in our October 2000 group test, it made short work of games, with performance on a par with nVidia's GeForce2 chipset.

ATI's Multimedia Centre software interface is excellent. Now in its seventh revision, it has more features than ever, seamlessly integrating all the card's functions. Standard elements comprise the DVD player, CD player, TV tuner, Teletext and video capture tool.

While older

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All-in-Wonder cards enabled you to use your PC as a digital VCR to record TV programs, ATI has gone one step further with the Radeon, adding timeshifting capabilities. Timeshifting is incredibly useful, as it means you don't have to wait until a program has finished recording before you can watch it. Instead, you're free to watch it from the beginning while the rest continues recording. This decoding and encoding can happen simultaneously, thanks to the on-board MPEG-2 decoder, which decodes the video from the hard drive while the PC's processor is used to encode the incoming video stream.

Alongside the Multimedia Centre, Ulead VideoStudio and Cool3D are bundled. VideoStudio allows you to edit the video clips captured from TV or a video camera. All the cables you'll need are included in the box, and a breakout box makes it easy to hook up your video source.

The All-in-Wonder Radeon is available in two flavours - 32Mb DDR (double-data rate) and 32Mb SDR (single-data rate). The SDR model will also be available as a PCI card for those who don't have the luxury of an AGP slot. To find out if there's any performance difference between a standard 32Mb DDR Radeon and the All-in-Wonder, we ran our usual tests using 3DMark2000. The ATI returned 3,667 3DMarks, versus 3,818 of the standard Radeon, showing that there really is very little difference.

Whether you're after home video editing on a budget, or simply want to upgrade your PC into more of an entertainment system, the All-in-Wonder Radeon offers excellent value.