Digital Trends

ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro

December 2nd, 2003 | by Jeff Fila

Hey, Nice Dongles
 

As you can see from the picture below, the board gets quite cramped with the addition of the FM tuner. To make room for all of these inputs and outputs, ATI moved the outputs off-board to a dongle. How they can turn an output with 28 pins into six connectors that can be used simultaneously we have no idea, but we're impressed. The two VGA connectors alone have 13 pins each.

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The ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro features an off-board dongle to handle outputs and inputs

The All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro is chock-full of input and output connections. The output dongle includes two VGA connections, an S-Video output and a composite video output. This should allow you to connect to any monitor or TV, besides the aforementioned DVI monitor. It also incorporates an S/PDIF digital coax audio output, for Dolby 5.1 Surround sound, as well as a standard mini-plug stereo audio output. 

On the input side, the purple input block allows you to connect a VCR or non-digital camera to your computer to import video. It includes connections for S-Video, composite video and left and right audio. ATI chose not to include a connection for IEEE-1394 (Firewire), which has been included on other All-In-Wonder products, but we don't see this as a problem. Most computers and motherboards come with several front and rear Firewire ports these days. The purple color wasn't the best choice in our opinion, however. If you are going to use the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro in a home-theater setting, it may look out of place with your black and sliver components. 

What's Under The Hood
 

The graphics processor is the same RV350 core that powers the regular Radeon 9600 Pro reference design. The major difference between the RV350 and the R350 core cards (like the Radeon 9800) is the number of pixel pipelines. The R350 features an 8-pixel pipeline but the RV350 has only a 4-pixel pipeline. According to ATI, since the RV350 is based on the 0.13-micron manufacturing process versus the R350's 0.15-micron process, it runs cooler and allows for a higher core clock speed. The All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro core is clocked at 400MHz. Basically, this allows ATI to produce a cheaper graphics engine that can often perform close to its more expensive Radeon 9500, which had been the reigning mid-range graphics card. 

The ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (left) and ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro (right)

The All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro features 128MB of Samsung 2.8ns DDR memory clocked at 325MHz, compared to the 300MHz of the 9600 Pro reference design. This allows the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro 800MB/s of extra memory bandwidth over the Radeon 9600 Pro.

As we suspected, the added 25MHz of memory bandwidth helps the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro score better than the Radeon 9600 Pro on all of the graphics benchmarks that we ran. There were slight increases in most of our benchmarking scores.

TV and radio tuning is done by a Phillips stereo TV and FM tuner. An ATI Theater 200 analog video decoder and stereo audio processor handles video capture.

The board has only one heatsink and fan, which is the same one that ATI has been using since the Radeon 8500s came out a few years ago. There are no heatsinks on the RAM; only on the GPU. With the addition of the TV and FM tuning and video editing, the board is laid out quite differently than the regular Radeon 9600 Pro. As far as we can tell, only the RAM and GPU are in the same locations.