ATI All-in-Wonder 128

The Ultimate All-in-one TV, Video, and Graphics card?

That's what ATI claims on the All-in-Wonder 128 box - that is certainly a lot to live up to. A look at the feature set shows that there is the potential for ATI to come through. The All-in-Wonder 128 provides a TV-tuner, digital VCR for video capture, the Rage 128 graphics core for great 2D and 3D, video-out, and hardware DVD playback - all on a single card and retailing at just $249.

Hardware

The card itself is a little longer than a standard Rage Fury board and features quite a few more components. The most obvious is the big silver box that contains most of the TV-Tuner functionality. The silver box provides shielding to the computer from the TV signal the signal from the computer. Besides the standard CATV coax and monitor connectors, there are two more proprietary ones. One facilitates input to the card and the other output from the card. A break out box handles the audio/video RCA and S-video inputs, while a "dongle" (it looks like a splitter cable) takes care of audio out to your sound card and TV-out. S-video and RCA video jacks are available for both input and output. It would have been nice if ATI had used a single box for input and output.

A small heatsink has now been added to the Rage 128 chip (allowing for an increased clock rate - now up to 105MHz according Powerstrip). Eight 2MB 8ns SDRAM chips make up the 16MB SDRAM total. The combination of ATI's ImpacTV2 and Brooktree BT829 chips provide for video input/output and video capture. Standard MPC2 CD-IN and CD-OUT connectors are also onboard, allowing the sound from your CD-ROM drive to pass through the All-in-Wonder 128 to your sound card.

Software

ATI's Multimedia Center provides a uniform interface across all their programs, which includes TV-tuner, video capture, video editor, DVD player, Video-CD player, and an Audio CD player. All can easily be launched from the ATI Launchpad (shown at right), which can be docked to the side of the screen or just float anywhere.

MGI Software's Videowave II, a $100 video editing package, will be bundled with the retail card, but was not available at the time of testing. ATI tops it off with the full version of EA's Moto Racer 2 and the "lite" version of Rage's Expendable. A coupon for the full version of Expendable will be included in the box and will ship when the game is completed.

TV-tuner

Click to enlarge

The TV-tuner component works quite well and has a number of unique features. The TV display can be within a window, full screen, or as your Windows desktop background. Thanks to the Rage 128's excellent video scaling abilities, the image quality is as good as the signal given to it - an S-video input from a DVD player was crystal clear, even when scaled to full screen in 1600x1200 resolution.

By far the coolest feature, and possibly the most useful, is the ability for an instant replay at any time. Imagine your watching a basketball game and someone makes a phenomenal play, but you miss it and they never seem to show a replay of what you want to see. No problem for the All-in-Wonder 128 - at the touch of a button, the All-in-Wonder 128 can replay the last few minutes (limited only by available memory), which can optionally be recorded using the digital VCR (see below).

Channel surfers rejoice! All it takes is one button for the All-in-Wonder 128 to show you a still image from every available channel allowing you to see what is on every channel simultaneously. From there, you can select exactly what you want to see with the click of a button.

Advanced closed captioning features are also included that allow the highlighting of any word you are interested in. The entire closed captioned transcript, along with intermittent snapshots, can be saved to a TV Magazine for later reference.