Specifications/lineup

As we just discussed, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 is meant to address ATI’s need for a DX9 multimedia card to serve the needs of the mainstream segment. Both cards share the same RV360 graphics core, first introduced last year. RV360’s rendering engine is composed of four pixel pipelines, with one texture unit per pixel pipeline and weighs in at a modest 60 million transistors, making it cheaper to produce. When you couple this with its 0.13-micron manufacturing process, the chip consumes less power and thus generates less heat, making it ideal for use in a wide variety of system configurations.

AIW 9600 compared to 9600 XT

ATI has reduced the core clock frequency from 400MHz in ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO to 325MHz in ALL-IN-WONDER 9600, making the chip even less power hungry. Another benefit is lower production costs, as chips that may not have fit the bill at 400MHz can now be clocked at the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s 325MHz rather than being thrown away.

The ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s memory subsystem has also been pared down from its predecessor in order to reduce manufacturing costs. While the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO utilizes high-speed 325MHz DDR memory (650MHz effective) the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 uses 200MHz (400MHz effective) memory. Fortunately the card ships with 128MB of memory and the interface is still 128-bits wide, ATI also manufactures an “SE” line of RADEON 9600 cards that feature a 64-bit memory interface. We’ve found in our testing that this implementation leaves the R360 VPU starving for more memory bandwidth, especially when eye candy features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are used.

Lineup changes for Q1’04

The introduction of the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 isn’t the only new multimedia product ATI intends to introduce. For the value market, ATI has prepped the ALL-IN-WONDER 9200. This is the desktop equivalent of ATI’s RADEON 9200, which essentially adds AGP 8X to the RADEON 9000’s (4x1) RV200 core. According to ATI’s roadmap, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9200 will do double duty, replacing the PCI-based ALL-IN-WONDER VE, and the ALL-IN-WONDER 9000 and is priced at $149.

The ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 card we’re reviewing today retails for $199, while the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO we reviewed last year will soon be phased out in favor of the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 XT.

The ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 XT is essentially a supercharged RADEON 9600 XT, as its core is clocked 25MHz higher than the desktop RADEON 9600 XT, at 525MHz. ATI has also equipped the board with 325MHz memory (650MHz effective), again, 25MHz faster than the RADEON 9600 XT’s memory. This makes the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 XT the fastest 9600 XT board ATI offers, an added incentive for those of you who are looking for a little more performance. The ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 XT will retail for $299 when it hits the market, while the ALL-IN-WONDER 9200 and ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 are currently shipping.

ATI will continue to offer the ALL-IN-WONDER 9800 PRO unchanged and also plans to introduce HDTV WONDER variants of the higher-end ALL-IN-WONDER products. Final price and availability of these cards hasn’t been confirmed but ATI expects them to retail for $100 more than their respective counterparts.