Ever since it's arrival in 1974, the role of the personal computer in daily life has perpetually evolved. Primarily developed for business use, the world's first personal computer was not targeted at individuals at all but rather at small businesses. Possessing the same processing power that could only be found in large mainframes years prior, the personal computer soon became a staple of both small businesses and individuals who found themselves on the cutting edge. It was not long after, however, that the personal computer finally met its target audience: the mainstream consumer. With innovations such as the graphical user interface, the role of the personal computer transitioned from one of work to one of play. No longer was the power of the personal computer only harnessed by technology fanatics but rather by a large portion of the population. Many homes found standard desk supplies pushed to the side to make room for a new computer.

As the role of the computer expanded, so did its audience. With PC games becoming more and more powerful, many households found themselves with not one but two personal computers: one in the study for work and one in the children's room for fun. The expansion continued, with the computer finding its way onto even more desks: one for mom, one for dad, one for sister and one for brother.

There has, unfortunately, been one room that the computer has yet to occupy. No it is not the closet; rather, it is the family room. One would think that with every member of the family possessing at least some knowledge of the computer, a computer would be quickly placed next to the TV. This, however, turns out not to be the case in many living areas. Users just did not find any use for keeping a computer even within a cable's range of their television. In recent years companies have tried to change this, attempting to make the PC less of a computer and more of a home entertainment center. With various companies attempting this transition, few have been met with as much success as ATI.

Ever since its first All-in-Wonder release that came powered by the Rage chipset, ATI has attempted to use each generation of their video processors on a one video card that possessed not only computer graphics capabilities but also TV-tuning features. With the goal of enhancing both computer use and TV watching, ATI's All-in-Wonder video cards have attracted two types of users. First are users who have no choice but to watch TV on their computer due to living space requirements. A perfect example of this may be a dorm room or a small apartment, where space may not allow both a full size television and a computer setup. By getting a video card with TV tuning capabilities, these users could use their monitor both as a computer display as well as a regular television.

The second type of user that All-in-Wonder products have attracted are those who want to enhance their television watching experience. All-in-Wonder type products offer not only the ability to watch TV from your computer but also watch your computer from your TV. Video-in and video-out systems offer this same type of feature, however with All-in-Wonder based products, the TV does not only have to display the computer screen but can also show, in full screen mode, just the television feed. Although this may not sound as attractive as having one TV input hooked up to the computer and the other, coaxial input connected to the cable line, watching TV through your computer offers many advantages.

Just what are these advantages and what can they do? Let's take a look at how ATI's newest All-in-Wonder card, the All-in-Wonder Radeon, plans on transforming the ugly cream colored box under your desk into a sheik black case that sits right next to your VCR.

The Core

As with every video card, something must power not only the TV side of things but also the computer side. In the past, the power of ATI's All-in-Wonder cards have been dwarfed in comparison to other video card offerings. Due to extra development time as well as frequent product delays, previous All-in-Wonder cards proved not to be very attractive to power users. In fact, the performance of the All-in-Wonder based products have historically lagged so far behind other video cards that some users actually found themselves buying not only the All-in-Wonder video card but also another manufacturer's card for use in games. Thankfully, with the current generation of All-in-Wonder cards ATI has completely fixed this problem How did they do that? By taking none other than their recently released Radeon core and making it the heart of the new All-in-Wonder Radeon.

Although we took an in-depth look at the Radeon core not too long ago in our ATI Radeon 64MB DDR review, let's refresh our memory as to what this powerful new core can do.

Three Texture Units

The Radeon core possess two rendering pipelines with three texture units per pipeline, resulting in a total of 6 texels per clock. This places the core 2 texels less than the quad pipeline, dual textured GeForce2 core that powers the GeForce2 MX, the GeForce2 GTS and the GeForce2 Ultra. Although now the Radeon core is actually crippled by the tri textured unit, due to the fact that the vast majority of current games use only two textures and leave the third texture unused, ATI is betting that future games will move to three textures, a transition that could leave the Radeon performing very fast and the GeForce2 in the dust. It looks like we might get to see if this is in fact the case with Microsoft's upcoming game entitled Halo, which supposedly uses three textures per pixel.

T&L

Similar to the GeForce2 core, the Radeon core possesses a T&L engine that is capable of performing transform, lighting, and clipping calculations right on the chip. In addition, the Charisma engine, as ATI likes to call it's T&L features, is able to perform both key frame interpolation as well as vertex skinning. Both are features that attempt to enhance the visual features of gameplay, it may be awhile before we see these features in action.

HyperZ

Perhaps one of the most advanced, as well as embraced features of the Radeon is its HyperZ technology. Aimed at reducing the amount of information that must travel over the video card's memory pipeline, HyperZ technology actually consists of three parts. First is Hierarchical Z, which attempts to reduce the amount of overdraw that is encountered in any given scene. Next HyperZ incorporates Z Compression, which losslessly compresses and decompresses the information stored in the Z-buffer, reducing the amount of data that is transferred during Z-buffer reads and writes. The final piece of HyperZ is Fast Z Clear, a feature that reduces the time necessary to clear the Z-buffer, a step necessary to render each new frame.

Look for an in-depth article describing HyperZ and its benefits in coming weeks.

Now that we have refreshed our memory about some of the technology behind the Radeon core, lets take a look and see how this core is used in the All-in-Wonder Radeon.

The Card Part I

Click here to enlarge.

Placing a TV tuner on a video card that is already quite packed required a bit of engineering. For ATI, this meant that the reference design for the Radeon would have to be smashed just a bit in order for the large TV tuner to fit. By altering the location of the BIOS, many power regulating components, and one RAM chip, ATI was able to make room for the TV tuning box, enclosed in a metal shield (more on that later). The card features the same Rage Theater chip present in the regular Radeon cards, a chip that allows for both video output as well as input. The Rage Theater chip has always received praise in the lab for providing both excellent video-out as well as very high quality video-in. The chip found on our All-in-Wonder Radeon proved to be no exception.

The first thing that struck us about the All-in-Wonder Radeon, besides the large TV tuner, was what appeared to be only a DVI-out video connector. ATI was quick to inform us that the connector was, in fact, a DVI-I connector that is able to display to not only DVI flat panels but also to standard CRT's with the use of a dongle. Sure enough, a bit of rummaging through the box revealed clear DVI-I to VGA dongle, capable of changing the digital only output to a standard analog connector. ATI states the the reason for switching to a DVI-I only solution is due to the fact the DVI market is growing extremely rapidly in Asia, with many computer users and OEM builders already using DVI only displays. By including a small dongle, ATI was able to appeal to both the DVI dominated market of Asia and the VGA market of the US and Europe, while also making good use of the precious retail space available on the All-in-Wonder Radeon. The truth of the matter is that the All-in-Wonder Radeon could not have made use of both a DVI and VGA connector due to space restrictions on the board. Rather than making two reference designs, one for VGA user and one for DVI users, the DVI-I and dongle solution must have proved to be quite attractive. In addition, this puts the Radeon's on-die TMDS to good use

Like one configuration of the popular Radeon card, the All-in-Wonder Radeon we reviewed was outfitted with 32MB of Samsung DDR SGRAM. Unlike the standard Radeon, however, the All-in-Wonder Radeon will only be available in 32MB configurations due to cost concerns. Since the 32MB Radeons use 6ns Samsung chips, while the 64MB card uses 5.5ns Hyundai DDR SDRAM, the shipping clock speed of not only the All-in-Wonder Radeon but also all 32MB Radeons is actually lower than the shipping clock speed of the 64MB Radeon. The 32MB cards come clocked at 166/166 MHz (166/333 MHz effective) due to the 6ns rating of the RAM chips, compared to the 183/183 MHz (183/366 MHz effective) speed rating on the 64MB Radeons. ATI decided to ship the core with the same speed as the memory . Since the core of the 32MB cards is no different than the core of the 64MB cards, almost every 32MB Radeon core should be able to hit 183 MHz quite reliably, but this may not be the same case for the Samsung memory. How did our All-in-Wonder Radeon card, which contains essentially the same components as a 32MB Radeon card, perform? Check out both the benchmarks as well as the overclocking section to find out.

As far as RAM options, ATI has other plans for the All-in-Wonder's memory solution, including both an SDR model as well as a 16MB DDR configuration. While the SDR model may prove attractive to retail consumers on a budget, the 16MB solution will most likely prove to be an OEM only option. Also look for a PCI version of this card in coming weeks, providing yet another option for i810 and BX-133 owners.

The Card Part II

The ViVo features of the All-in-Wonder Radeon are a bit more advanced than the standard Radeon. On the out side of things, the All-in-Wonder offers the same composite and S-video out connectors as the standard Radeon, however the All-in-Wonder version also includes a sound-out connector as well as an S/PDIF output for Dolby Digital Audio output. While the audio-out pass through was necessary to provide sound for TV shows, the S/PDIF out connector is a nice feature that no other All-in-Wonder type card that we have seen possesses. One complaint we have about the output dongle is its loose connection to the card. It was very easy to pull the dongle out, and with cables hooked up to it, it was not that unlikely for it to fall out completely.

On the input side of things, we find that the All-in-Wonder Radeon uses the same breakout box as previous All-in-Wonder products. Unlike the video-in function of the standard Radeon, the All-in-Wonder Radeon is able to take not only composite in but also S-video in as well as left and right channel sound in. The S-video in feature is quite nice and comes in handy with newer video camcorders, however sound is just as easily recorded by hooking an input source to the sound card. It seems quite likely that this is exactly what the All-in-Wonder Radeon does, looping sound through the card and into the sound card via the attached audio-out pass through cable. The output dongle fit snugly into the card, providing a stable connection.

On the back of the All-in-Wonder Radeon, we find both a RAM chip as well as Micronas 3430G sound processing chip that serves to send the un-amplified sound from the TV to the sound card. Manufacturers try their hardest to keep large components off the back of the PCB, as they increase manufacturing costs. In the case of the All-in-Wonder Radeon, ATI had no choice but to place components on the back due to the extremely full front of the card.

The large metallic box that replaces the location of the BIOS, one RAM chip, and power components is what makes the All-in-Wonder Radeon unique from not only other Radeons but also from many other video cards. The sliver box houses quite a few electronic components not found on the vast majority of video cards and is actually manufactured on its own PCB that interfaces with the card through a series of pins. Coming out of the box and sandwiched between the video-in and video-out connectors, we find the coaxial cable connection; a cable that proves to be the lifeblood of the All-in-Wonder Radeon. Without this connector plugged into a video source, the All-in-Wonder Radeon becomes nothing more than a ViVo (video-in/video-out) Radeon. However, plug it in and you enter a whole new world. Let's take a look at it.

The Software Part I

The key to any TV tuning solution is the software. Without proper implementation, TV tuning video cards could be limited to less features than even a normal TV. Luckily, ATI's Multimedia Center 7 harnesses all of the All-in-Wonder's features in one complete suite. This suite is a combination of 7 programs, each made easily assessable via ATI's Launch Pad program or the taskbar driven menus.

Each product in the suite features the same general visual appearance, a kind of futuristic design that we have seen on previous All-in-Wonder products. Although some may find the look appealing, it greatly limits the usability of the suite applications. Function buttons are often described with a vague picture and a small amount of bubble text that appears when the cursor is left over a button too long. The lack of a menu driven system may appeal to some users, however for us it took away much of the intuitive nature of Windows programs. We often found ourselves clicking on buttons just to see what they would do, rather than attempting to figure out what feature the icon represented.

With that said, let's take a look at each program in this 7 program suite.

Launch Pad

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The Launch Pad utility provides quick access to each program in the suite. Offering a variety of locations, including the side of the screen, the top of the screen and a floating option, Launch Pad makes sure that the programs you need are close at hand. It may seem that this feature would best left running at startup, however the program takes quite a while to finish loading, preventing system use even more during those bootups. For us, it made the most sense to access the features via the standard Start menu or taskbar driven option

File Player

As the name implies, the File Player utility plays files. This program is very similar to Windows Media Player, as it is able to play video files in a variety of formats using the built-in Windows codecs Nothing too special here. ATI most likely included this program as an OEM selling point, as it allows for nearly everyone to easily play files from one location. In fact, File Player it even goes and associates movie file types to the player, making movie playback brainless, a feature that OEM's love to see.

Video CD

Similar to file player, Video CD is a media player contains the same functionality as Windows Media Player.

CD Player

Once again, CD Player attempts to take the place of the built in Windows CD Player. Offering CDDB functions (song name, CD title, ect.) using cddb.com, CD Player offers little additional functionality over the built in Windows CD Player.

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DVD

This is the software DVD player that comes with the Multimedia 7 package. Essentially a software DVD player, DVD allows for the playing of DVD movies directly from your DVD drive in your computer. If you recall from our Radeon 64MB DDR review, ATI cards have long been regarded as the best DVD decoding cards on the market due to the hardware supported IDCT, inverse discrete cosine transform. This function of DVD playback that is done solely by the CPU in software only decoders, only ATI includes this feature on chip, allowing for less CPU intensive DVD playback.

Besides watching DVD movies on your computer, the video-out features of the Rage Theater chip can be harnessed to pipe this DVD image to you television. Using either the S-video out or the composite out, DVD movies can be displayed full screen on any hooked up device.

The Software Part II

TV Tuner

It is with this utility where we really start to see the true power of the All-in-Wonder based cards. Think of the TV utility as exactly that: a TV inside of your computer. However, unlike a normal TV, watching television on your computer is quite engaging.

Upon clicking on the TV icon for the first time, you are prompted through a setup utility that scans for channels, configures your sound, and sets your recording options. Once this setup phase is complete, you are well on your way to watching TV from your computer. The TV utility has quite a number of unique features that really enhance TV watching, which we will get into in just a moment. The television display can be resized to every dimension, with options to keep the aspect ratio or to allow free resize. The channel buttons are easy to find, marked with up/down arrows and the software features the same record to disk feature of older versions, which allows you to save any show or movie to a file in mpeg format.

Closed captioning is visible either directly on the television image or in a dedicated window. A whole show transcript can be captured to a "TV Magazine" for later reference. There is a parental lock for restricting access to certain channels and ratings, as well as a capture to image feature that takes a still snapshot of the current TV feed. A zoom option is also incorporated into the software. This feature allows the user to draw a box around an item of interest on the show, say a character's face, and have the TV tuner zoom to fit that box to the screen. This is nice for getting more detailed pictures of what is going on, but keep in mind that you are still limited by the quality of the cable-in feed, making the close-up pictures look grainy and pixelated.

Perhaps the best feature of the TV tuning software is what ATI likes to call "TV-on-Demand." This feature is similar to the TiVo set-top box that can be found at many electronic stores. The TV-on-Demand software that is built into the TV tuner application allows for the user to not only pause live TV while still being able to see the rest of the show, but it also allows for the 11:00 movie to be started at 11:15. This feature is called time shifting and requires quite a bit of power, as the video card must both decode one signal for playback on the screen and encode the stream coming from live television. The amount of time that one can time shift is only dependent on hard drive space. One can fast forward, rewind and change the play back speed of any time shifted information, allowing for total control over the television experience. Let's say that we are watching a 30 min show that starts at 10:30 but we do not want to see any commercials. With TV-on-Demand, all one needs to do is start time shifting the show at 10:30, by clicking on a single button, and then start watching the show at 10:45. Now, with your system running 15 minutes behind live TV, it is possible to fastforward through all the commercials, rewind to see just what the character said, or pause the TV to run and get a drink. With the TV-on-Demand, it is possible to do all of these things, all without the monthly fee of TiVo.

This is a very nice feature, which is not limited to use on your computer display. If you use a coaxial cable for your All-in-Wonder Radeon, you can then use the S-video or composite out connectors to pass the cable information (along with your computer display) back to the TV. By doing this and putting the TV tuner application in full screen mode, it is as if the cable is coming directly into the television; until you move the mouse the is. Once the mouse is moved, a navigation bar pops up, allowing for a channel change as well as access to the TV-on-Demand functions. This makes those shows with intolerable commercials much more watchable.

Guide+

The final application in the suite is not actually made by ATI at all. Produced by Gemstar, the same people who produce the TV Guide, Guide+ is essentially a TV guide for your computer that allows the user to download location specific channel information from the internet. Each week, Guide+ downloads a list of the show times, duration, names, and ratings.

Previously, these kind of features were only available on All-in-Wonder cards that were running Windows98, as this operating system has the optional WebTV feature which is very similar to Guide+. Now with Guide+, all users can know what is on at what time, as well as search the weekly database on a variety of information, including show type, actor name, and show title. Clicking on a show that is currently playing brings up a preview window with the live TV in the box and closing the Guide+ software launches the TV tuner application with the preselected channel set. In addition, shows that are not playing can be flagged for recording at a later date.

Since the software is not produced by ATI, there are banners on the right hand side of the screen that display advertisements that are downloaded along with your weekly program schedule. Currently the only ads running are ATI ads and Guide+ ads, but expect this to change as Guide+ grows, as these ads are Gemstar's primary source of income from the Guide+ software.

Click here to enlarge.

In addition to all the packaged ATI software, the All-in-Wonder Radeon comes with a variety of software and recommended downloads. First there is the rather awkward Ulead VideoStudio 4 software package that is supposed to allow for easy video editing. This package is commonly found on cards with video capture capabilities and while it is hugely popular among video card manufacturers, we have yet to see why. The interface is awquard and the steps to import a video seem almost laborious. Yes, it gets the job done, but at a price of convenience. The included software package also has Merlin VR for simple 3D modeling as well as Mediator 5. Fun to play around with, we don't think that many All-in-Wonder users will be using these two pieces of software for more than a few days.

The Idea

Now that we have taken a look at what the All-in-Wonder Radeon can do, let's take a look at a test system that ATI gave us to display the power of the All-in-Wonder Radeon.

As you can see, ATI's image of a living room entertainment center is a black computer case. The computer comes with one feature that makes living room use almost impossible to live without: a wireless keyboard and mouse, meaning that TV-on-Demand can be controlled just as easily from you couch as from your desk.

When ATI gave us this system, they wanted to put it to special use by allowing the computer to be sold on an eBay auction ending August 29th 2000. All the money raised will be given to charity, as our Chief Editor Anand Shimpi describes best:

As I'm sure many of you have heard by now, Jeremy Allford a long time member of our little community here has been suffering from a GleoBlastoma tumor that has already occupied approximately 25% of his brain. I've known Jeremy for over 3 years now, he took me to my first E3 and was the personality that drove AGN3D to become one of the most popular news sites at the peak of their existence.

Unfortunately a while ago, Jeremy was given the horrible news that he was suffering from cancer. The tumor has plagued his life for around a year now, and not only has it put himself through probably the worst times I can even begin to imagine, but his family including his two wonderful children (one 8 and one 2.5 years old) through a tremendous amount of pain, both emotionally and financially.

Tomorrow morning, at 3AM EST, Matthew will be posting his review of the ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon card that ATI supplied us with. They also supplied us with a full system (minus monitor) that features the card as well, they told us that they'd be selling the system and we could donate the money to any cause we saw fit.

Jeremy immediately came to mind, he has been a long time friend and he is one of the founders of the community you see today. Three years ago on-line sites didn't have the power they do today, but it is because of people like Jeremy that the community has gained so much power in the eyes of the big manufacturers out there. Needless to say, I felt that Jeremy would be the most deserving of the proceeds of this auction so I immediately sent my suggestion off to ATI. They seemed to like the idea, and I had the opportunity of chatting with Alex Ross of Sharky Extreme and he shared the same passion I felt to help Jeremy out, so it was decided that we would donate all the proceeds to help our the Allford family.

ATI will be selling the system that is currently in our lab on eBay alongside a similarly equipped system from Tom's Hardware, Sharky Extreme and Gamer's Depot.

I highly encourage you all to dive deep into your hearts and feel for Jeremy and his family, we often take what we have for granted, but this is a chance to give back to someone in need. The item number on eBay is 414239920, or you can just click here to bid on the system. I don't usually ask much from you all, but this is the one exception. I've been watching the community grow for the past 3.5 years now, and if anything, I know that our readers are some of the most giving, generous and caring individuals out there...it's time to show Jeremy and his family exactly how much we support him.

You can read one of Jeremy's most recent posts of his condition here.

--Anand Shimpi, 8-20-2000

I think Anand said it best. As always, our hopes and prayers are with Jeremy and all others suffering from such a devastating disease.

With that said, let's go to the benchmarks and investigate how the All-in-Wonder Radeon performs, a card that also models the performance of all 32MB DDR Radeon cards as well.

The Test

For the testing, we used the same systems as were used for the GeForce 2 GTS review, with updated drivers. In the case of the Radeon, we tested with the shipping drivers with V-sync disabled as well as "Convert 32-bit textures to 16-bit" turned off.

We left out the 800 x 600 scores since they didn't really show anything with these cards other than a small drop in performance when compared to 640 x 480 frame rates.

OpenGL Performance - Quake III Arena - 1GHz Thunderbird

As you can see, the 32MB Radeon card performs slightly behind its more powerful 64MB brother. The 640x480 performance is indicative of the performance difference across the board between the 166/166 MHz Radeon and the 183/183 MHz 64MB Radeon cards. The Radeon cards beat out the NVIDIA based cards by quite a margin at 640x480 as a result of the low end speed loss encountered with the newest Detonator3 drrivers.

At 1024x768 it looks like the 32MB All-in-Wonder Radeon is not in as good of shape, with the All-in-Wonder card placing below even the budget GeForce2 MX on the graph. This low placement on the graph is actually a result of our 16-bit graph sorting. We have always sorted our graphs by 16-bit color, however we are entering a time where fewer and fewer people play in 16-bit color. With that in mind, look for our next major video card review to provide a transition to 32-bit sorting.

With that in mind, we can take a look at the above graph. As we found in the past, the Radeon is a poor performer in 16-bit color, meaning that in the future you may not be able to fall back on this lower color depth in order to gain speed. Once Quake III is put in 32-bit mode, the Radeon begins to shine, and the All-in-Wonder Radeon is no exception. Performing 5% slower than the higher clocked 64MB Radeon, the All-in-Wonder 32MB Radeon was still able to provide 71.5 FPS, placing its 1024x768x32 performance right around the GeForce256 DDR.

Once again, as a limitation of our 16-bit sort, we find the All-in-Wonder Radeon falling towards the bottom of the chart as a result of its poor 16-bit performance. At 48 FPS, the cards 1280x1024x16 performance is only slightly above that of the aged GeForce256 SDR.

At 1280x1024x32, the All-in-Wonder Radeon finds itself performing 11.3% slower than the higher clocked 64MB card. The 46.6 FPS speed of the All-in-Wonder card places it behind the GeForce2 GTS and slightly above the GeForce256 DDR.

At 34.1 FPS, the All-in-Wonder Radeon is not doing so well at 1600x1200x16, getting beat out by most of the NVIDIA cards. The 32-bit performance of the All-in-Wonder Radeon at 1600x1200 places it 12.1% behind the 64MB Radeon, most likely due to both the lower memory amounts as well as the higher card speed.

Direct3D Performance - UnrealTournament - 1GHz Thunderbird

As we have found in the past, Unreal Tournament really has a liking for 3dfx based cards, with the Voodoo5 5500 coming out on top. We also find that the Radeon based cards perform very well. The slower clock speed of the 32MB Radeon card is apparent but does not result in as large of a performance difference that we saw in Quake III Arena tests.

Once again, we see the ATI Radeon based cards performing well. Most noticeable is the difference in speeds between the 64MB cards and the 32MB cards. This is a result of the texture hungry Unreal Tournament engine, where in 32-bit color 32MB cards are forced to texture swap due to insufficient card memory.

At 1600x1200x16, we find the All-in-Wonder 32MB Radeon card performing 7.1% slower than the higher clocked 64MB card. Other than that, the All-in-Wonder Radeon seems to perform quite well in comparison to NVIDIA based products.

Overclocked Performance

When we first sat down to overclock our All-in-Wonder Radeon from its standard 166/166 MHz speed, we were a bit surprised with the results. Although we could push the memory clock no higher than 185 MHz, understandable considering the 166 MHz rated speed of the memory, we were quite shocked with the apparent core speed that PowerStrip would let us push the core to: an astounding 246 MHz, the limit. A bit fishy, we thought, but perhaps we got an exceptional core. It was not until we had a conversation with Chris over at Sharky Extreme did we realize what was going on.

It seems that our All-in-Wonder Radeon card has the core and memory speeds locked together, a fact that PowerStrip can not know or fix. Although the program was reporting a core speed of 246 MHz, the core and the memory were both running at the maximum memory speed of 185 MHz. Surprising? You bet, especially considering the fact that our 64MB Radeon did not have this same problem.

There are three explanations to answer why this was happening. First, ATI could have altered the BIOS of only our 64MB Radeon test cards, allowing these test samples to overclock the core and memory clocks independently while the shipping versions did not possess this capability. Secondly, ATI could have revised the BIOS on all Radeon cards and locked the memory and core clocks together, meaning that some early 64MB Radeon cards will be able to overclock the core and the memory to different speeds. Finally, this issue could reside only in our early All-in-Wonder cards or in each All-in-Wonder card. We will investigate the matter further and be sure to report back to you with any information we find.

With that said, we could get our All-in-Wonder Radeon to reach a maximum overclocked speed of 185/185 MHz (185/370 MHz effective). Let's take a look at how the overclocked card performs in comparison to the stock clocked All-in-Wonder Radeon.

As the above graph shows, the largest performance increase comes at 1024x768x32. With a framerate of 76.9 FPS, the All-in-Wonder Radeon lags only 2.7% behind the 64MB Radeon, showing that the largest performance difference between the cards is a result of the different clock speeds. Overclocking the All-in-Wonder Radeon at 1024x768x32 provided in a 7.6% performance increase, resulting in 5.4 additional FPS.

Conclusion

The main problem with previous All-in-Wonder products has been their subpar 3D performance, a fact that has deterred some buyers. The All-in-Wonder Radeon finally brings the All-in-Wonder product line up to par, with very good performance for the price.

That brings us to our next point. Just what is the price for the 32MB All-in-Wonder Radeon? Well, it should be arriving at shelves near you with a sticker price of $329.99. Luckily, ATI has provided a mail in rebate worth $30.00 to help ease the purchase and put the final price of the 32MB All-in-Wonder Radeon to the magical $299.99, placing it only about $25 over the price of a ViVo (video-in/video-out) 32MB Radeon. Quite nice, considering the added benefits of the All-in-Wonder products have usually come at a more hefty price premium.

Is the All-in-Wonder Radeon right for you? As always, that depends. Some people out there reading this will know that the All-in-Wonder Radeon is just the card they have been waiting for, finally matching 3D performance with a TV tuner. A student going to college may be a perfect example, as the All-in-Wonder Radeon not only allows you to play Quake with the best of them, it also allows you to watch your favorite episodes of South Park right on your computer.

In addition to those out there who know that the All-in-Wonder Radeon is the perfect video card upgrade for them, there are also those who know that the last thing they need in their system is a television. Be it because they don't have a coaxial connection for cable in the computer room or that they do not feel that using your monitor as a television is all that appealing, these users would be much better off going with the regular Radeon.

The vast majority of people out there really will not know how much they will use the All-in-Wonder features until they try it. The problem has been that ever since ATI released the Rage128 Pro cards that incorporated the Rage Theater on them, the line between the All-in-Wonder cards and the regular cards has been getting finer. Now, with many Radeon cards coming with ViVo features powered by the same Rage Theater chip found on the Radeon, the All-in-Wonder only adds TV tuning to an already impressive card.

True, TV-on-Demand and Guide+ are nice, but many users will find the novelty worn off in a short time. Sure, it is nice to play with for a while, but changing channels with your mouse soon becomes old. And as far as placing your computer next to your TV, that too becomes old. The truth is that the standard television can still not replace the monitor and as a result of this using an All-in-Wonder Radeon system in your family room would require not only your standard TV but also a computer monitor within a cables length; something that is not quite socially acceptable yet.

As far as the Radeon's driver stability, there are clearly still some issues to work out. In order to experience to what extent these problems range, I have been running a 64MB Radeon in my personal system for the past week now. No driver issue I ran into prevented me from playing games all together, however I did encounter some problems that prevented resolution changing as well as producing a few random crashes. It is clear to me, after running the card in my system, that there are still some issues to be resolved on the Windows 2000 side of things. As far as the All-in-Wonder Radeon, I ran that in my system as well and encountered quite a few problems. ATI was quick to assure me that the drivers I was testing with were still beta and did keep their word by releasing new beta drivers even during our short testing period. Expect the stability of the All-in-Wonder cards to be about the same as the regular Radeons when they ship, meaning that there will still be some driver issues, but many not as bad as previous products.

There is no question that the integration of the computer into the home has come leaps and bounds since its introduction 27 years ago. The PC has quickly been invading every room in the house, with the family room being one of the few remaining computer-less rooms. Does the All-in-Wonder provide a solution to this problem? Yes. Is it a replacement for a good TV, VCR, and DVD player? We don't think so. But then again, for only $25 more, you can find out for yourself.

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