ATI All-In-Wonder HD Video Card Review

ATI All-In-Wonder HD Video Card Review ATI All-In-Wonder HD Video Card Review ATI’s All-In-Wonder line has always held a special place in the heart of multimedia enthusiast. From 1996 to 2006 ATI stepped up each generation to provide a great gaming experience along with the added benefit of being able to watch TV and video from an external source, such as Cable TV or a Video Camera just to name a few. In 2006 ATI announced what was considered to be the last of the AIW cards, the AIW X1900. Fast forward to June 2008 and the revamped ATI now owned by AMD launches the next generation of the AIW, the ATI HD All-In-Wonder. Any great piece of video hardware has to have a solid base, the ATI HD AIW is based on the ATI HD 3650 GPU. In the past, AIW cards were generally based on near the top of the heap video cards, being that the AIW HD is based on something a little less formidable we see a big change in that regard. The HD 3650 is no slouch for gaming, but you are not going to be able to crank visual settings up much if you plan to game at HD resolutions. If you need more background info on the HD 3650, we covered the launch back in January. The card is a little oddly colored with a purple PCB and red heatsink shroud. The gold piece on the top is the tuner. On the bottom left, we see the connector for the included daughter card. While gaming performance may be off the pace there is good reason, in the past watching TV on your PC was a niche market and most gamers didn’t mind the extra noise and heat that went along with it. Today things have changed, owning a Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC) is growing trend and moving closer to mainstream. Power, heat, and noise play a critical role in what devices builders use to keep the correct atmosphere for their living room or “theater room.” This is why the HD 3650 was spec’d for the job of the AIW HD. ATI has handed over the video processing duties to their Theater Pro 650 chip. With plenty of features built in it is more than capable of handling your needs. Below are just a few of the specifications: 125 channel TV tuner with stereo audio New worldwide video decoder NTSC, PAL, SECAM support 5-line 2D comb filter Motion adaptive 3D comb filter Worldwide audio decoder 3:2 pull-down Motion compensated noise reduction Edge enhancement Hardware MPEG compression engine MPEG-2 720x480 compression CBR and VBR from 1 to 15 Mbps FM radio reception Digital audio processing Hardware DRM engine VBI slicing Audio/video input support ATSC digital TV support (optional) DVB-T digital TV support (optional) Now that we know a little more about our card, let’s get an idea of the layout.