Board analysis

ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 board

Back of the card

When designing an ALL-IN-WONDER board, ATI’s engineering team must always play a careful balancing act with the final board design. Space is at a premium, as the Philips TV tuner requires a large amount of room. Meanwhile, audio/video capabilities are handled by a discrete chip, THEATER 200, which takes up additional space on the PCB.

At the same time, heat must be combated, especially on the higher end chips like RADEON 9800/9700. When you couple this with other factors, such as I/O capabilities, it’s a minor miracle these boards are able to be manufactured at all, especially when you factor in the $50 price premium they’ve traditionally sold for.

In order to make the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 cheaper to manufacture than its predecessor, some compromises had to be made. The most visible difference is the card’s cooling unit. Whereas the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO utilizes a traditional heatsink/fan setup, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 relies solely on passive cooling. A large, black heatsink sits directly above the VPU, and for greater surface area extends over the board’s memory modules.

This change shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise if you’ve seen ATI’s desktop RADEON 9600, which also features a passive cooler. In fact, it looks like the exact same heatsink ATI uses on its RADEON 9600 boards. As a result, the board is silent, making it a tempting solution for those of you looking to build a silent or near silent system, but may disappoint enthusiasts who would like to dabble with overclocking. In operation we found that the heatsink does an adequate job of keeping the RV360 core cool, although we did find that the heatsink did get somewhat hot after extended use.

THEATER 200 chip

Samsung 4.0ns memory

AIW 9600 back plate

Since the card’s memory is only operating at 200MHz, ATI foregoes the BGA memory modules used on the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO for traditional TSOP memory. This is another wise cost-cutting measure. Our board shipped with 4.0ns memory modules manufactured by Samsung. At 4ns, these modules are rated for operation at 250MHz, leaving quite a bit of headroom in theory, but our overclocking attempts were pretty unsuccessful (our evaluation card couldn’t maintain stability at 340/210).

To further reduce costs, ATI also omits the radio tuning capabilities found in the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO/XT, but fortunately, dual VGA is still present. ATI bundles the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 with a video connector, which offers dual VGA outputs, DVI capability isn’t supported by the card. ATI wanted the card to appeal to the widest audience and while LCDs are overtaking CRTs, VGA is still the predominant display interface on the market.

Accessories

Also included in the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s packaging is a purple VIVO module, which provides RCA and S-Video inputs for connecting devices such as your VCR or camcorder to your PC for video editing. ATI’s traditional desktop RADEON video cards don’t provide this feature.

Video connector and VIVO box

Another shot of the video connector

REMOTE WONDER

Another hardware accessory exclusive to the ALL-IN-WONDER line is REMOTE WONDER. REMOTE WONDER is one of the coolest hardware accessories on the market. It integrates all the functionality you need for watching TV and playing DVDs, and since it’s a radio frequency remote, line of sight isn’t required for operation. This is important for those of you who may have your PC setup in another part of the room.

In addition to the standard buttons for volume/channel control, playback, etc, REMOTE WONDER also integrates buttons necessary to manipulate software applications within ATI’s Multimedia Center. For instance, the power button can be used to close programs, while the guide button is used to launch GUIDE PLUS+, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s electronic programming guide which we’ll discuss in more detail later. The remote even has a directional thumbpad for mouse control and left and right mouse buttons. To top it all off, ATI includes six programmable buttons which you can program to perform a variety of Windows and TV functions.

On the software side, ATI bundles the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 with a copy of Pinnacle Studio 8 SE and muvee autoProducer DVD Edition.