Good All Around Card, Nice Features
Written: Oct 07 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: lots of features, can do almost anything, decent for 3D gaming, good price for the amount of features
Cons: buggy although working software, video capture could use some work
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| icicle's Full Review: ATI All-in-Wonder® 128, (32 MB) PCI Video Car... |
The ATI All-In-Wonder 128 has been a good card in my experience. It's features include:
ALL-IN-WONDER 128 At A Glance (from ATI's website)
Intelligent TV-Tuner with Digital VCR
128-bit 3D graphics acceleration
True color (32-bit) gaming
Video output to TV or VCR
Still image and MPEG-2 motion video capture
Video editing
Hardware DVD video playback
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The quality of the TV tuner is very good, I use it all the time, although the implementation of the program to watch TV could have better controls. Nice features include being able to capture stills and the Video Desktop (where the TV becomes your wallpaper. You can work in the foreground and watch TV!). I don't use the Closed Caption functions such as 'Watch for words', or the channel preview, but those can probably be useful to someone.
The 3D graphics acceleration is nice, but it won't have the mind-blowing framerate of the latest generation of accelerators from 3dfx or nVidia. My experience has gotten a little bit more than 35 fps in Half-life and Quake III, which is very playable, even at resolutions of 800x600 and higher.
I haven't tried out the output to TV/VCR yet, but from the other features of the card, it would seem to me that this would work as well as the other parts of the card, which is very good.
Video capture with this card is a slightly different story. The video editing software that they include with the OEM version (if you didn't buy it in a store) supplies only basic cutting out of sections of video that you capture and is very buggy. I have yet to have an editing session that didn't require a reboot. If you capture without editing, i.e. just record a TV show to watch later, then the software is very capable. Editing with the included software is not recommendable. Also, capturing in formats other than ATI's own AVI format has given slight problems, but it seems to be just buggy software that's causing it. This may be fixed later as I have emailed their customer support and it seems to be a known problem.
The hardware DVD playback is very good, so you won't need a DVD decoder card to watch your DVDs. There isn't much to say about this other than it works and it works well.
Other notes:
- The ATI All-in-Wonder 128 is limited to the default 16MB RAM
- Includes just about all the cables you need
- Software isn't the greatest in the world, but it WILL get you by
- I personally had an incompatibility problem with it, a Sound Blaster Live!, and a VIA chipset motherboard, where you would hear an annoying screech whenever you had Wave playback (MP3, system sounds, etc.), but from what I gather is a fairly isolated incident. This was corrected with the
<a href=http://www.viatech.com/drivers/4in1414.exe>4-in-1 Driver Pack from www.viatech.com</a>
- The technical support is decent enough, they answered all of my emails about the screeching noise, although they didn't solve the problem.
- Any problems you may have, you could try the newsgroup alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati
- Price: about $175
- Documentation: average
- Ease of use: average, but, again, part of the problem is the software
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
icicle
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Reviews written: 1
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