ATI Technologies Inc. 100-709038 All In Wonder Radeon SDR 32MB PCI Graphics Card

Rating:
Summary: Install only if you have good PC skills!
Review: Good: Nice card with lots of features. Digital VCR and TV/Movie Dialog transcription.

Bad: Badly written ATI installation software and documentation can cause headaches and PC crashes.

I purchased the AIW Radeon PCI Bus 32MB version about two weeks ago. I spent about three hours trying to get the software to run properly. The bundled Media Center and Drivers totally corrupted my DirectX 8.1 drivers. The documentation included is practically useless and the folder names on the install CD make it very difficult to ID what you want to manually install. But once installed it seems to work as advertised. I still get no sound from the digital VCR feature though, I just downloaded the latest drivers and software from ATI's site, so hopefully this will be able to fix the problem.

Watching TV from your PC monitor is fine, although the picture sharpness is a little soft. The MP2 recording quality is good, just be sure you have A LOT of disk space. The MP2s at acceptable quality runs at about 1MB/Sec!! The movie images are a little bit on the soft-side but still very good, don't expect DVD-like quality! The faster your PC, the better off you'll be. I am running a P3-600 with 256MB RAM and 20GB HD.

I like the ability to turn the desktop wallpaper into a live TV screen. I also think the ability to record actual TV/movie scripts is way cool. It is a feature that takes the Closed Captioning and transcribes the dialogue into a Rich Text Format on your PC. And of course you have the ability to capture screen shots from wahtever you happen to be watching. ATI claims that their software will not record copyright-protected programming (ie DVDs or VHS). I have not tested this claim. Finally the card seems to do fine as a gaming card. I ran Alice (some minor lags with detailed 32bit textures, 800x600) and No One Lives Forever with good results. While it's no GeForce3, it's fine considering that it is supposed to be an "All-In-One" card.

If you have the PC skills and patience during installation, the card's features and performance will reward your efforts. Just be sure you get the latest drivers and software from ATI. Don't use that miserable setup CD that's included!

Rating:
Summary: Powerful, versatile card
Review: Somewhat difficult to configure initially (using some of the screen resolution settings made the screen go completely blank. Had to reboot in safe mode several times and edit the win.ini file before I found a compatible setting). Since the installation manual isn't too helpful, this card is best suited to people who have some experience installing computer hardware.

Once installed, it has worked flawlessly. Some of the features are really cool: digital VCR (works much like a Tivo), ability to run a monitor and TV at the same time, stills gallery.

Serious gamers will note this card doesn't have the cutting edge polygon rendering that the top Nvida cards have. But most people will find this card fast enough for most games.