It's a Wonder I Ever Survived Without It
Written: Jul 07 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent 2D. Decent 3D. Amazing DVD. Cool TIVO and Tuner features.
Cons: No Firewire. No RCA Audio in.
The Bottom Line: Thumbs up for this jack of all trades!
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| kinneys's Full Review: ATI ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON, (32 MB) PCI Video Card |
Well, not exactly. But still, I absolutely LOVE my ATI AIW Radeon.
To start with, it is based around ATI's Radeon GPU, which is paired with 32mb of 166mhz DDR RAM. While that is not as fast as the Radeon 64mb's 183mhz, the Radeon core does not scale particularly well with faster memory, meaning that the real world performace difference is virtually nothing. The AIW's 32mb of RAM are a bit low when working with extremely complex 3D textures, or so I've heard. I have yet to run into something that it can't handle.
Whether you are a gamer or a home entreprenuer, you probably spend the majority of your time looking at 2D images. The AIW Radeon is far superior to any other card I've owned, including GeForce 2 MX, Geforce 2 Ultra, TNT2, and Kyro II. It does 32 bit to 2048X1536 (not that you'd need it to, but still) and supports a myriad of refresh rates. I run at 1280*1024 @ 85hz on a Sony 20SEII trinitron monitor. Its 2D is -crisp- and text is amazingly sharp, as sharp or sharper than Matrox cards I've seen. 2D is on par with the Matrox G450, the most respected card on the market.
3D is pretty good too. The framerates aren't exceptional, given that the Radeon isn't the top 3D GPU on the market, but it holds its own in games like Quake III. No one really needs much more than 40-50fps, and unless you are playing at a resolution like 2048*1536 (which no one does), it'll serve you fine. There is no texture tearing or anything like that evident in the games I've played, although I don't profess to be a hardcore gamer.
The DVD capabilities of this card are simply breathtaking. I run it attached to a 20" monitor and a Denon receiver w/ some serious speaker wattage, and it rivals most any home theater setup I've seen. The AIW Radeon has a S/PDIF coaxial out for DVD, which lets me pipe the Dolby Digital/DTS sound straight to my receiver without any software interference. The picture is awesome onscreen, system utilization is very low, and the sound is flawless. I find myself watching movies while CD's are burning, programs are compiling, etc. Never skips a beat...much better than any software solution out there and I haven't seen any better hardware.
My All In Wonder's TV tuner hasn't been fully utilized yet, although I've tried it once on a little bunny ears antennae and was able to pick up one (fuzzy) channel. I'm waiting until I have cable until I use it every day. I did notice that it has some cool features, including the option of making your desktop wallpaper the TV channel being viewed, and I think it has some sort of TIVO like thing to pause live action. I'll investigate next year when I get cable.
It's kind of nice, because with this monitor, dvd, and this video card, I don't need a seperate TV and DVD player.
I've used the AIW to do capture from my camcorder, and while it looks best as MPEG2 (the card's native format), I've found if I capture to 640*480 mpeg1 that I can then edit that in premiere and save it as a much smaller format. It's not like my camcorder has that good of resolution, anyhow. I don't need IEEE 1394 (Firewire) support, but if you do, this card doesn't have it.
I'm running it with Windows 2000 on an AMD Thunderbird 900 (overclocked to 1050) on an Abit KT7-A (KT133A) motherboard. While I've heard all sorts of complaints about ATI's Win2000 drivers, they're more than adequate for daily use. I think most of the whining comes from those who demand 100+ FPS in QuakeIII, rather than the vast majority of people that actually -use- their PC's for what they were designed. Mine is as stable as a rock, and has been for 5 months.
If you're looking for a 'swiss army knife' type of card, I'd enthusiastically recommend the AIW Radeon. However, if you find yourself saying "I don't need the video stuff, I don't have home theater equipment to hook to it, I don't need a TV tuner", you might want to look at the plain vanilla Radeon 64 or if you're on a real shoestring, the 32mb Radeon LE that can be had for around $70. Beware of buying more card then you need, all this will probably be obsolete in a few years anyway. For now, though, the AIW Radeon is a steal for anything less than $215.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 200
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Epinions.com ID:
kinneys
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Member: Scott K.
Reviews written: 19
Trusted by: 2 members
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