Television

It’s impossible to estimate precisely the quality of TV signal reception of a particular TV-tuner/multimedia combo. Why? Just because this quality is largely determined by the equipment of the given cable TV provider – by the transmitters and amplifiers and the network. When you’re receiving a TV signal from an air antenna, everything becomes even more complex: the quality depends on the TV center’s equipment as well as on the distance to the TV tower and on the weather conditions. Thus, our experience is subjective, relevant to our conditions only; other users of the combo/TV-tuner may see quite another picture.

In our case, the GeCube All-In-Wonder 9600 XT detected 66 channels out of 67 offered by the local CTV network. The image quality was very good, but the sound was worse – sometimes a loud hiss was audible.

Anyway, we could avoid the cross-talk we heard when reviewing the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro. This time we connected the combo-card to the audio card with an internal well-screen cable and selected the CD-Audio input as an audio source.

Testbed and Methods

The GeCube All-In-Wonder 9600 XT is not only a multimedia complex of software and hardware components, but also a nice gaming accelerator of the middleclass. What performance does it provide in modern computer games? Does it differ from the standard RADEON 9600 XT at all? These are the questions we’re going to answer today with our tests:

First Person 3D Shooters:

• Call of Duty;
• Halo: Combat Evolved;
• Unreal Tournament 2004;
• Highly Anticipated DX9 Game 1;
• Highly Anticipated DX9 Game 2;
• Far Cry;
• Painkiller;
• Firestarter.

Third Person 3D Shooters:

• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time;
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne;
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Simulators:

• IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles;
• Lock On;
• Colin McRae Rally 04.

Strategy:

• Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour.

Semi-synthetic benchmarks:

• Aquamark3.

Synthetic benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 340.

We ran the tests on the following testbed:

• Athlon 64 3400+ CPU (2.20GHz, 1MB L1 cache);
• ASUS K8V Deluxe mainboard;
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB, CL2.5-3-2-8);
• Seagate 7200.7 HDD (SerialATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2;
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP1, DirectX 9.0b;
• Drivers: NVIDIA ForceWare 60.72, ATI CATALYST 4.4.

We had the following graphics cards participating in our tests:

• GeCube ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 XT (525/625MHz)
• GeCube ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 XT (625/390MHz)
• ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO (400/625MHz)
• ATI RADEON 9600 XT (500/600MHz)
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (475/900MHz)
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 XT (400/700MHz)

We included the GeForce FX 5900 XT for the sake of comparison, since this eight-pipeline GPU with a 256-bit memory bus belongs to another and higher class than the rest of the participants.