Digital Trends

ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro

December 2nd, 2003 | by Jeff Fila

Video Editing
 

It was nice to be able to dust off some old VHS tapes and import and edit them on our computer. Importing at the highest quality was very simple and we were able to make a DVD out of the tape that looked and functioned much better than the VHS. The included Pinnacle Studio 8 created menus and titles and allowed us to effortlessly burn to DVD.

Like in the FM radio and TV, sound volume on recorded video was lower than the original output. We had to crank up our sound levels to get an adequate level.

You can really see the difference in video quality between VHS and digital when you import a VHS tape to a computer. We had to keep it at the highest quality because of the already low-quality aspects of VHS video. The capture software allows you to select the quality of the video you capture from analog, digital or broadcast sources by using a preset selection or creating your own. Keep in mind that importing and editing video takes up a lot of hard drive space and you'll need a fast hard drive.

On To The Gaming
 

At the core of the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro is the RV350 graphics engine - ATI's extremely popular mainstream gaming processor. Gaming with the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro is even a slight bit better than with the Radeon 9600 Pro because of the increased memory bandwidth.

We were able to run all games we tried at or near the highest visual settings with full-screen antialiasing off with no problems. The RV350 is still not powerful enough to have all of the eye-candy turned on as well as FSAA, but that's what the high-end cards are for.

Call of Duty, Splinter Cell and Medal of Honor: Spearhead all looked and performed great. Spearhead stock maps were constantly over 120 frames per second on our test rig. Some Call of Duty players have complained about the Radeon 9600 not working with the game — a problem that ATI has since fixed with a driver patch — but we experienced no problems with the Catalyst 3.8 or 3.9 drivers.

Conclusion
 

The All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro is a very powerful mainstream graphics card and multimedia workhorse. It is the perfect video card at the perfect price range for someone with basic cable who wants to be able to watch TV and listen to the radio on his or her computer and play the latest games. It is also great at importing analog video and helping you convert it to CD or DVD. It would be an editors choice score if we rated the card only on it's gaming and video performance and included extras, but we aren't going to do that.

We can't get over the poor performance of the Remote Wonder and the buggy-ness of some of the software. ATI also does not come out and tell consumers that the product will not tune their digital TV stations. It may be assumed to be a given by some, but many consumers aren't going to think of this. ATI touts the package as such a value because of all the added software and the Remote Wonder, which costs $49 by itself. Unfortunately, there are headaches and glitches that come with these add-ons. When reviewing this product, we couldn't help but think about the average consumer with the average computer troubleshooting skills having a hard time with the glitches we observed.

We'll update our review when the ATI Remote Wonder II is available. Hopefully ATI will have worked out the bugs with the first version. We're also working on an HTPC that incorporates the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro and uses third-party software for TV listings, PVR and DVD viewing. We'll let you know if that makes a difference in the performance of this card.