Introduction

All-in-Wonder

ATI's latest creation, the Radeon has taken quite a few people by surprise. In the past couple of years, ATI had been plagued with product delays and disappointing real world performance. This sounds similar to what people were saying about AMD just before the Athlon came out. With the Radeon, ATI has created one of the fastest consumer 3D graphic accelerator systems -all in time for the back to school buying spree.

ATI's All-in-Wonder family of integrated graphic platforms, featuring full screen video capture capabilities and onboard TV tuners, defines convergence products. Everyone today is talking about convergence with HDTV on your computer and Windows on your TV; ATI has been there from the beginning. The Radeon now comes in the All-In-Wonder flavor. If Victorinox, the makers of the Original Swiss Army Knife, were to make a video card, it would look something like ATI's All-In-Wonder Radeon.

All-in-Wonder Radeon

Kitchen sink?

The core of the All-In-Wonder Radeon is the ATI Radeon graphics processor. In our recent preview of the 64MB DDR Radeon, we found that this chip is not your father's Rage Pro. The All-in-Wonder Radeon's 3D performance should be on par with the vanilla 32MB Radeon board.

Accompanying this graphics processor is the ATI Rage Theater chip for the analog television output and analog video input (S-VHS or Composite). A standard NTSC TV tuner is also part of the deal. The back of the board has a DVI connector with a 15pin VGA adapter. The more advanced digital connector allows the All-in-Wonder to power a 1600x1200 LCD panel instead of the traditional 1024x768.

The AIW's only competition right now is NVIDIA's GeForce GTS and GeForce GTS Ultra. Some versions of the GeForce GTS can be had with TV input/output capabilities, but ATI's experience in video lets the All-in-Wonder Radeon do some pretty nifty things. All this can be had for a retail price of $329 for our tested 32MB DDR version.