No need to leave the house anymore!
Written: Sep 30 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Every feature under the sun, great TV reception
Cons: Video capturing is horrible, doesn't really need the DVD player
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| dokool's Full Review: ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 128 Pro, (32 MB) AGP Video Card |
Ah, the wonders of the digital age. You can order food online, you can order music, movies, and games online, and I'm sure there are some very quirky delivery programs where you can do just about anything online. The list has been modified: now you have almost no excuse to leave your computer, thanks to the ATI All In Wonder 128 Pro.
It may not seem a lot to someone upgrading from a higher-end 3d card, but I'm not someone. The AIW went straight from the box into the slot that my Intel 740 was occupying. You can stop laughing now. After spending a minute praying that when I let the power flow into my computer again, I'd see something, I pressed the "On" button. The drivers and hardware were easy to install, and after finishing all that and rebooting, the first thing I went to was the TV player. Crisp video and audio came onto my screen and went straight to my brain. My TV doesn't get reception this good.
From there, I found the one, and only, serious flaw: Video Capture. It's bulky, slow, options are hard to follow, and it captures using the special ATI VCR codec, which makes it a pain to watch on other systems unless you convert to MPEG. Not only that, you're limited to 40 minutes of encoding time, as it has not mastered the art of multiple AVI files. Personally, I'd recommend using AVI_IO for your capturing needs.
The scheduler for the program is decent, and the TV Magazine feature (Records the closed captions into a transcript) is an original feature.
At this point, I have not used the MPEG-2 decoder that comes with the AIW for a single thing. That's because I like the one that came with my Creative Labs PC-DVD Encore 8x.
Now, how will this affect your gaming? After watching Deep Blue Sea on my desktop, I popped in my Quake 3 cd. Colors were brighter and more vivid. 3d was even more so. The images were faster than ever. I have witnessed the same results for Diablo 2 and Command and Conquer, Red Alert.
The AIW comes with some other cool features... for example, you can use your tv as a monitor. Unless you have a wireless keyboard and mouse, so you can sit in bed and surf the net or play games, I honestly don't see why this feature is needed. Regardless, it works great, and all the more power to ATI for it.
All in all, other than the video capturing, the ATI All In Wonder is a video card that should be on anyone's hardware wish list. This one will stay in my machine for a long, long time.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dokool
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Member: Danny Orlowitz
Location: Melrose Park, PA
Reviews written: 19
Trusted by: 0 members
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