Design/THEATER 200/REMOTE WONDER

ALL-IN-WONDER 9700 PRO card

The back of the card

New board design

In order to accommodate the TV tuner, several changes had to be made to the board design of the ALL-IN-WONDER 9700 PRO. For instance, power circuitry that was once located in the upper left corner of the board is now dispersed lower. The heatsink has been redesigned to allow room for the TV tuner and power circuitry, while at the same time still dissipating heat effectively off the R300 core. And finally, the THEATER 200 chip is placed on the back of the video card.

THEATER 200

ATI has replaced its venerable Rage Theater chip with THEATER 200 for ALL-IN-WONDER 9700 PRO. The new chip brings increased audio and video quality over its predecessor, which is pretty impressive considering that Rage Theater was already well equipped in comparison to its competition.

To improve visual quality, ATI has employed its third generation comb filter, an adaptive 2D 3-Line Comb Filter. This new comb filter allows the THEATER 200 chip to more accurately process composite video signals, allowing for a better picture. Competing solutions utilize 2 lines for NTSC.

For increased audio fidelity, THEATER 200 contains dual 12-bit analog-to-digital converters. Other products on the market only offer 9-bits or less, putting ALL-IN-WONDER 9700 PRO in a class of its own when it comes to audio quality.

REMOTE WONDER

One feature that is carried over from the ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON 8500DV is ATI’s REMOTE WONDER remote control unit. REMOTE WONDER is custom tailored to the ALL-IN-WONDER family, providing one button access to the applications within Multimedia Center 8.0. To launch the TV player, simply press the “TV” button, or the DVD button can be used to open ATI’s software DVD player.

REMOTE WONDER

The REMOTE WONDER can even act as a mouse. The directional keypad on the top of the remote acts as a joystick for your mouse with the buttons on the left and right acting as left and right mouse buttons. The power button is used to close programs, and six function keys can be programmed to perform a wide variety of functions.

In case you were wondering, REMOTE WONDER is an RF remote; line of sight is not necessary to operate the remote control unit. In fact, you can even operate the remote from another room! Each remote control unit can be assigned a unique ID for those of you who live in dormitories or apartment complexes, or if you’re lucky enough to have multiple PCs in your house or apartment equipped with an ALL-IN-WONDER graphics card.