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ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 Review March 08, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With its RADEON 9600 core, dual VGA, and THEATER 200, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 builds largely on its predecessor, ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO, but there are a few differences besides just the clock speeds of the two cards. See how ATI's latest multimedia card stacks up to the other ALL-IN-WONDER cards as well as the RADEON 9600 PRO and RADEON 9600 XT in today's review!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 17 ) |
A PC in every room?
Traditionally the PC has been used for gaming and productivity applications, relegating its use to the den or home office, ten years ago many didn’t have a PC at home at all. Then the Internet revolution began. The Internet age was filled with buzzwords, many wanted to “surf the web”, but had no clue what was involved. Eventually, the bubble burst. The market was over saturated and the cool factor was gone. The PC industry needed another killer app.
Many are placing their bets on digital entertainment to be that next killer application. ATI was one of the first companies to recognize this, releasing their original ALL-IN-WONDER card in 1996. Now Microsoft, ATI, NVIDIA and others have released products and services that are designed to cater to this market. Slowly but surely they plan to change the way consumers use their PC. Their ultimate goal is to take the PC from just the den to the living room, bedrooms, and even the kitchen.
With ATI’s ALL-IN-WONDER, you can combine the functionality of your home theater system’s DVD and CD players, VCR, and TiVo all into one device. And thanks to ATI’s EAZYSHARE, you can stream television or other video content to any ATI-based PC in your home. At the same time, you’ve still got a powerful PC that can be used for gaming and occasionally getting a little work done. Sounds cool doesn’t it?
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Of course, in order to make this dream a reality, price must remain low. ATI has maintained aggressive pricing on their current lineup of ALL-IN-WONDER cards, with the premium usually held to roughly $50 more than their less capable desktop PC variant, but they’ve also had a massive hole in their product lineup.
At the extreme end of the lineup is the ALL-IN-WONDER 9800 PRO. This chip sports ATI’s RADEON 9800 PRO VPU, which is clocked at 380MHz, and is paired to a 256-bit memory interface operating at 340MHz (680MHz effective). ATI’s ALL-IN-WONDER 9800 PRO is built for performance, and with its $400 price tag, is the Ferrari of the AIW line in more ways than one.
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Next up is the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO. This card’s core is clocked at 400MHz, features half as many pixel pipelines, while the memory interface is sliced in half at 128-bits. The ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO is priced at a more affordable $249, but still misses that important $200 price point so many consumers look for. Below the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO lies the ALL-IN-WONDER 9000 PRO and ALL-IN-WONDER VE. Both of these cards deliver significantly reduced 3D performance in comparison to the higher end ALL-IN-WONDER cards, but to compensate they’re priced to move, the ALL-IN-WONDER VE retails for $99.
To help fill the gap between the ALL-IN-WONDER 9000 and ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO (which we’ll illustrate in our forthcoming benchmarks), ATI has introduced the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600. This card is built on the same core technology as its PRO counterpart, but ships at lower clock speeds.
SIDEBAR: ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 Product Webpage
| Specifications/lineup | Page:: ( 2 / 17 ) |
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.
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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.
SIDEBAR: Remember that GUIDE PLUS+ applies to the North American market only.
| Board analysis | Page:: ( 3 / 17 ) |
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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.
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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.
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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.
SIDEBAR: The ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 has a 3-year warranty.
| TV viewing | Page:: ( 4 / 17 ) |
Thanks to the integrated TV tuner, you can transform your PC into a television, or hook your PC up to your current home entertainment system and use the PC to output to your TV. The tuner supports up to 125 cable television stations (70 if you use the antenna).
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The tuner is quite responsive, adjusting channels in the blink of an eye. Keep in mind that the quality of the tuner (and the THEATER 200’s 12-bit analog-to-digital converters) far exceeds the display quality of most cable providers, so you will see just how good or bad your cable signal is on your monitor.
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Setting everything up is a snap. Simply install the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 like you would any other video card, connect the VIVO module, video connector, and your television’s cable or antenna connection. Finally run your speakers into the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s audio input on the video connector, and use the provided audio output to hook up your sound card. Once everything’s setup, boot up your system and install ATI’s software. The entire process shouldn’t take more than ten minutes (although that will depend on the speed of your system) and just in case, ATI provides a wealth of documentation to walk you through the process. Once the software is installed and you launch the TV application, the tuner can automatically scan for stations, just like a regular television.
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ATI has integrated the TV player seamlessly into Windows. One popular example is THRUVIEW. This feature makes your television display transparent -- your desktop can literally be transformed into a transparent television display!
This is also a cool toy to use in programs like Excel or Photoshop, as the TV show you’re watching appears underneath the application you’re using. It can be a bit distracting, just imagine trying to focus on a Word document while a high-speed car chase literally appears underneath your work. The ATI TV bar can be used to provide somewhat similar functionality, and even integrates the GUIDE PLUS+ listings so you can see what’s on other channels.
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ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 also supports mulTView. mulTView adds picture-in-picture support to the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s repertoire. You can also use it to record one channel while watching another. Just pop in a second TV tuner and you’re all set.
SIDEBAR: The level of THRUVIEW transparency can be adjusted to make it more comforting to your eyes.
| GUIDE PLUS/EAZYSHARE | Page:: ( 5 / 17 ) |
The ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s TV tuning capabilities wouldn’t be complete without Gemstar’s GUIDE PLUS+ electronic programming guide (EPG) software. GUIDE PLUS+ is like your newspaper’s TV listings on steroids. With GUIDE PLUS+ you can view your current TV listings, or your listings for the week.
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GUIDE PLUS+ provides programming descriptions (where available), just like your cable or satellite provider would, in addition you can browse television listings by a variety of categories. Say for instance, you want to browse for certain sports or an individual actor. You can also use the search feature to find all instances of a particular show; this is perfect for syndicated television programming like The Simpsons or X-Files.
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Setup is a snap, simply enter your zip code and based on that answer, GUIDE PLUS+ will ask you which cable service you use. Once you’ve selected your provider GUIDE PLUS+ will download the television listings (which are updated weekly) and launch itself. GUIDE PLUS+ is completely free for ALL-IN-WONDER users, there are no setup or monthly fees to pay to use the service.
GUIDE PLUS+ is more than just a TV guide however. You can use the GUIDE PLUS+ software to record all your television programming for a given week, just like a TiVo unit. Or, if you’d like to record an entire season’s worth of episodes, SCHEDULE+ (which is integrated directly into GUIDE PLUS+) can be used.
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Another capability that the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 shares with TiVo is the ability to timeshift, ATI refers to this feature as TV-ON-DEMAND. With timeshifting, you can step away from the TV without missing anything. Simply press the pause button on your REMOTE WONDER remote and the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 will automatically save the program you’re watching to your PC’s hard drive (based on video quality settings you’ve predefined). Then, when you come back, press play to see what you missed. You can fast forward or rewind through the content you’ve saved, or if you’d like to jump straight back to live TV you can do that too. This feature was used by numerous TiVo users during the infamous Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl this year.
EAZYSHARE
One of the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s cooler features is EAZYSHARE, which ATI recently added to its Multimedia Center software. The premise behind EAZYSHARE is simple: sharing the video content provided by your ALL-IN-WONDER card with other PCs within your home. EAZYSHARE essentially turns your ALL-IN-WONDER system into a video server, with the other PCs within your home network acting as clients. From the client machines you can watch TV, and timeshift, as long as you’re using a card built by ATI. Powered by ATI cards like those manufactured by Sapphire, Powercolor, ASUS and others won’t work with EAZYSHARE, and of course, graphics cards based on NVIDIA GPUs won’t work with EAZYSHARE.
In theory, this all sounds great but in practice we found EAZYSHARE’s instability to be such a hassle that the feature was essentially useless. ATI introduced EAZYSHARE in Multimedia Center 8.8, so we’re hoping they’ll be able to perfect it with a little more time. The other applications within Multimedia Center ran flawlessly.
SIDEBAR: EAZYSHARE supports up to four clients
| Test conditions | Page:: ( 6 / 17 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
ASUS K8V Deluxe
512MB OCZ EL PC3200 (DDR400) SDRAM
ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 9800 PRO
ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO
ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 9600
ATI RADEON 9600 XT
RADEON 9600 PRO
ATI RADEON 9000 PRO
Driver version CATALYST 4.2
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0b
Benchmarks
Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
Call of Duty (demo0032 custom demo)
Quake III: Arena version 1.32 (fscrusher demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003 (T2 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (paris demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved (stock benchmark)
SIDEBAR: March Madness is here!
| Call of Duty | Page:: ( 7 / 17 ) |
Call of Duty – OpenGL
SIDEBAR: Baseball season is about to start. Ugh.
| IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles | Page:: ( 8 / 17 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: REMOTE WONDER requires one of the USB ports on your PC.
| Quake III 4xAA 8xAF | Page:: ( 9 / 17 ) |
Quake III - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: ATI should probably offer EAZYSHARE TV client as a separate download. Seems like a waste to have to download MMC for client machines.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 4xAA | Page:: ( 10 / 17 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: UT 2004 just went gold!
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 11 / 17 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: Pandora Tomorrow will also be released this month.
| Tomb Raider | Page:: ( 12 / 17 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: We enabled depth of field for Tomb Raider testing (V49).
| Lock On: Modern Air Combat | Page:: ( 13 / 17 ) |
Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: LOMAC hasn’t received a lot of press, but it’s a really fun game.
| UT 2003 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 14 / 17 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003
SIDEBAR: UT 2004 will begin shipping next week.
| Halo | Page:: ( 15 / 17 ) |
Halo
SIDEBAR: Decided to skip overclocking testing this time around since the board barely overclocked.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 16 / 17 ) |
Pros
Multimedia marvel: With ATI’s excellent software applications and THEATER 200 chip, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 is equipped to do it all. You can use this card to edit home movies, make vid caps of your favorite Xbox and PS2 games, or hook it up to your VCR to transfer old movies from tape to your PC.
In addition, thanks to the built-in TV tuner you can watch and record TV on your PC, transforming it into a digital VCR. ATI bundles the card with REMOTE WONDER, which makes controlling everything a snap, even from your couch on the other side of the room. And with Gemstar’s GUIDE PLUS+ software and TV-ON-DEMAND, you’ve got all the capabilities of a TiVo, only you don’t have to pay a monthly fee.
Performance: While the RADEON 9600 isn’t going to break any new records in benchmark performance, it’s a nice performance improvement over the other multimedia cards in the value segment, such as the ALL-IN-WONDER 9000/9200 and ALL-IN-WONDER VE, especially when you turn on anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Plus the card offers DX9 compliance (although you’ll probably want to limit your screen resolution to 640x480 or 800x600 in these titles).
Dual VGA: For years ATI’s ALL-IN-WONDER line lacked dual display capability, even though the chip natively supported it. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case, as both the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 and ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO support dual VGA displays. With CRT prices still falling, building a dual display system has never been more affordable. It’s also a natural fit for ALL-IN-WONDER, considering their incredible multimedia capabilities.
Price and availability: ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 cards have been shipping for over a month now, so finding cards isn’t too difficult. In fact, cards can be found online for less than $170, $30 less than MSRP.
Now factor in all the goodies you’re getting. Conventional RADEON 9600 (non SE, which features a 64-bit memory bus) cards start at about $100, but they don’t offer built-in TV tuning or video input capability. You’d have to pay about $40-$50 to buy a good TV tuner card like ATI’s TV WONDER. Then pay another $35-$50 for REMOTE WONDER, $100 for Pinnacle Studio 8 SE, and $60 for muvee autoProducer DVD Edition. Once you’ve added everything up, you’re looking at another $235+ on top of the price of your shiny new RADEON 9600 card ($335 total). At $335, you could nearly buy two ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 cards!
Even if you decide you don’t need the video capture software you’d still have to spend $75 for the remote and TV tuner card, which puts you $5 behind the street price of ALL-IN-WONDER 9600, which would give you both and EAZYSHARE capability.
Cons
No DVI: Unfortunately, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 doesn’t offer support for DVI devices like flat panel monitors, VGA is the only display option. ATI felt that DVI’s penetration in the value market is rather limited, with VGA being the predominant display. With only the high-end LCDs shipping with DVI capability, we certainly agree with that assessment.
SIDEBAR: Head on over to the verdict!
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 17 / 17 ) |
FiringSquad says:
ATI has delivered another winner with the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600. ATI has taken the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO’s best feature (dual VGA) and brought it to a lower price point, plus it features the capable RV360 and THEATER 200 chips.
This 1-2 combination gives the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 good performance in a wide variety of software applications. The hardcore gamer will probably want to go PRO, as the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 trails its predecessor by a double digit margin in most benchmarks, but for the casual gamer the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 should offer plenty of performance, just remember to keep the screen resolution down to 800x600 for optimal frame rates. On the video side, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 offers all the capabilities of more expensive ALL-IN-WONDER cards (including the flagship ALL-IN-WONDER 9800 PRO), but at a much lower price point.
And of course, for television viewing the ALL-IN-WONDER line is superb. ATI mates the hardware and software brilliantly. Setup and operation is a snap, and the video quality is only held up by the quality of your cable or antenna signal. GUIDE PLUS+ and SCHEDULE+ can be used to manage all your TV content, while REMOTE WONDER allows you to control everything from your couch or the other side of the room -- it’s no irony NVIDIA decided to essentially copy it for their Personal Cinema line.
For small form factor users planning to build a PVR or HTPC box, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 would be perfect for this application. Its passive cooling ensures that it will remain silent, while at the same time the board doesn’t generate an excessive amount of heat. Noise and heat are the two main culprits in any small form factor setup, so it’s good to see that the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 is built to address them.
The only real complaint we can see is the lack of DVI display capability. Right now VGA is still the predominant interface, even among LCD users, so we don’t see this as a huge negative considering the value segment ATI is targeting for this card. But at the same time we do realize that a DVI option would give the card more flexibility.
When you add it all up, it’s hard not to like the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600. ATI’s simply got the best solution in the $150-$200 price range. If you’re looking for a solid multimedia card that can do it all and then some, it’s hard not to be impressed by the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600.
SIDEBAR: What do you think of the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600? Plan on going PRO? Chat with others in the news comments!