by Alexey Stepin
07/01/2004 | 02:09 PM
A graphics card that allows watching and recording TV programs and listening to your favorite radio stations, besides running 3D computer games? ATI Technologies answers “yes” with its All-In-Wonder family of graphics cards.
<%BANNER[article]%>The family features the entire spectrum of GPUs – from value to top-end solutions. And they all have one thing in common – All-In-Wonder cards are all equipped with a high-frequency unit for receiving television and radio signals, thus transforming your PC into an all-purpose multimedia center.
At the end of the last year, we reviewed one such card, the GeCube All-In-Wonder 9600 PRO. That product was based on the RV350 GPU, which was later replaced by the RV360. The new version of the core can work at higher frequencies due to the improved low-k tech process. So, ATI Technologies and its partners revised their assortment and complemented it with the All-In-Wonder 9600 XT. Of course, we can’t wait for any revelations from this product, but let’s take a look at it anyway.
You may remember the All-In-Wonder 9600 PRO device we reviewed in the last year. It was manufactured by GeCube, a member of Gigabyte Group. The All-In-Wonder 9600 XT comes from that manufacturer, too. Unlike its ancestor, this card came to us in its gorgeous retail attire, with the Remote Wonder control included in the package. The box is painted in GeCube’s standard style: red, black and gold tones. The picture is too traditional for the company – a daemon or some other fantasy creature.
The box contained all the necessary cables, adapters and splitters as well as CDs with drivers and CyberLink PowerDirector 2.5 ME. Instead of the game (Delta Force: Black Hawk Down used to be included), we have a remote control called Remote Wonder and an antenna for receiving radio waves. Like the All-In-Wonder 9600 PRO, the new model doesn’t support DVI-interfaced monitors directly: the splitter only has two ordinary D-Sub connectors at the other end. This is not a disaster, but still an annoyance for the owners of TFT panels with the digital interface. The violet-color commutation unit is responsible for the attachment of external video and audio sources; its cable is well-screened and flexible.
The design of the print circuit board hasn’t changed since the All-In-Wonder 9600 PRO and that’s no surprise – the RV360 doesn’t differ from the previous value chip in anything, save for the clock rate.
The old PCB worked well, so there was no sense for the manufacturers to spend money and effort for inventing anything new.
The only difference of the new model from the older GeCube card is the cooler: the small heatsink with a noisy fan is now replaced with a serious construction equipped with a spout case. The ribbed surface of the heatsink is right above the graphics core, while the fan is placed higher and blows air through the ribs. That’s not a novelty as coolers go, but still quite an efficient solution. Moreover, the big heatsink implies noiseless cooling. And really, the fan was practically silent, but provided enough cooling for the GPU. The cooler is fastened to the board by means of two spring clips – its size and weight don’t require additional fastening.
Against our expectations, the heatsink doesn’t cool down the memory chips, although this could have been easily realized. As it is, we have a gap between the heatsink and the four chips on the front side of the PCB. The chips on the backside of the card are not cooled either. Still, you don’t have to worry about them – they remain just warm at work.
A nice feature that we first saw in the All-In-Wonder RADEON 9600 PRO is available in the new card, too. It is an internal connector for linking to an internal audio input of the audio card or the mainboard. This frees the external Line-In socket, to which you may want to attach rear satellites or central/subwoofer channels of your multi-channel speaker system. In order to use that connector, you should select the appropriate input of the audio card (mainboard) during the initial setup of the ATI Multimedia Center; otherwise, you won’t hear anything. The input you need is usually called “Auxiliary”, but you can also use a “CD Audio” input since modern PCs send a digital signal along the IDE bus during playback of music CDs.
The graphics processor works at 525MHz on this card, and the memory from Samsung is clocked at 325 (650DDR) MHz. There’s a slight overclocking above the regular clock rates of the RADEON 9600 XT, but it’s not too big to give any significant advantage to the GeCube card. We tried the card at real overclocking, too. Using RivaTuner and extensive external blowing we sped the card up to 625/390MHz. ATI’s 0.13-micron tech process with new dielectric materials brings its fruit!
We’ve already mentioned the Remote Wonder control included with the GeCube All-In-Wonder 9600 XT card. Why not the second version of the remote control? The fact is ATI Technologies doesn’t supply Remote Wonder II even to its partners, not mentioning retail dealers, but uses this control in “Made by ATI” products only. Thus, the rest of the manufacturers (and their customers) have to be content with the first version of the Remote Wonder. Fortunately, you don’t practically lose anything in functionality: the newer remote control just has a different shape and placement of elements as well as a larger coverage area.
The control allows using all the functions of the ATI Multimedia Center which we discussed in our previous review, but that’s not all. The open REMOTE WONDER software architecture permits adding various plug-ins from third-party developers, which infinitely extend the functionality of the system. At least, after we installed appropriate plug-ins, we used our Remote Wonder for controlling Winamp, Foobar2000 and BSPlayer of different versions. You can find a lot of such plug-ins in the Internet.
The control can also be used as an ordinary mouse – there’s a round knob at the top of the device with two buttons on the sides.
The shape of the control is all right, but the size…
The size is rather too big, for our taste at least. The placement of some buttons is inconvenient, too. For example, the playback button group is found at the bottom of the control, so you have to hold it by the very tip and twist your thumb mercilessly to reach those buttons (if you prefer using the control with one hand only). The purpose of the five buttons located above and forming a circle is not intuitively clear. In TV-sets these buttons usually serve for switching between the channels, adjusting the sound volume, or even navigating the menu. Here, however, the first two purposes are assigned to the two seesaw buttons located right below the cursor-controlling pad.
Anyway, these are all minor flaws that vanish before the numerous advantages of the Remote Wonder system. I consider the use of radio waves instead of the infrared range as a fundamental advantage since many users have their system cases shoved under the desk or in some other place where the IR beam can hardly access. Then, you have to aim an infrared control at the photo-receiver, while the Remote Wonder releases you from this necessity. I think the external receiver unit has only one drawback – the USB cord it rather short.
We installed the latest, ninth version of the multi-purpose software suite called ATI Multimedia Center. From version 8.8 on, the ATI MMC features the following innovations:
Otherwise, the functionality scope of the Multimedia Center remained the same – you can refer to our GeCube All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro Review. After the installation, the ATI LaunchPad offers you the following components:
We didn’t install Gemstar Guide PLUS+ since it’s absolutely useless in the region where our test lab is situated (see here for details).
The above-mentioned review also covers the capabilities of particular programs. I’d like to note that radio programs can still be recorded in one format only: MP3, 224Kbit, 16bit, stereo. The Personal Video Recorder option of ATI TV Player now offers an opportunity of creating your own presets for recording video in the MPEG-4/DivX format. The presets support PAL and NTSC formats, resolutions up to 720x576 inclusive and bit-rates up to 10Mb/s. You can record with either constant or variable bit rate. The quality of the audio stream may vary from 64 to 384Kb/s.
VideoSoap settings are rich, too. You can simultaneously use four special effects, setting each of them up independently. This function can be of great help in improving the image quality of a noise-ridden TV program.
EAZYSHARE is the most interesting feature of the new version of the MMC. Its key point is in transforming the PC with the installed All-In-Wonder card into a server for broadcasting video stream over the local network to other PCs with installed client EAZYSHARE software. To do that, you select the appropriate mode when installing the MMC on the computer you intend to use as a server. For all the clients, you select the EAZYSHARE Client option. In the MMC settings, on the EAZYSHARE tab, you specify the type of the protocol and choose the clients who are allowed to connect to the server.
After the launch of the EAZYSHARE TV application on the client PC, the server PC automatically activates its server part. In a few seconds it starts broadcasting the video stream and the picture of the current channel appears on the client computer, in a window. The image quality is of course lower than of the original. The contents of the EAZYSHARE TV window lag behind the image on the server by a few seconds.
We also noticed that the sound on the client PC is reproduced with a strong echo when the video stream is being transferred across a local network. There’s also an annoying lag when you switch between the channels on the client computer: you have to wait for 5-7 seconds for the channel to channel.
Watching TV programs from the EAZYSHARE server put a load of 2-4% on our 100Mb network. That’s low enough, but we used only one client. You can only switch channels on the client PC after sending the request (press Request Control) and receiving a positive response.
Besides these options, the users of the EAZYSHARE system can:
EAZYLOOK is a special menu system for controlling the MMC suite from the REMOTE WONDER control. The very concept of a remote control implies that the user is at a distance from the computer, so the use of large letters in the menus is most appropriate.
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.
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:
Third Person 3D Shooters:
Simulators:
Strategy:
Semi-synthetic benchmarks:
Synthetic benchmarks:
We ran the tests on the following testbed:
We had the following graphics cards participating in our tests:
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.
The GeCube card looks appealing as it keeps on at the same level with the GeForce FX 5900 XT, although falls back after we enable full-screen antialiasing (FSAA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) – no wonder as the FX 5900 XT is equipped with a 256-bit memory bus. Overclocking of the GeCube ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 XT is rewarding – you get a nice performance gain.
The GeCube does well in this game, too, and overclocking even helps it get to the level of the GeForce FX 5900 XT.
This time we used the full version of Unreal Tournament 2004 for testing purposes and the demos were all real gaming situations.
Without the eye-candy features like AF and FSAA, the cards form a dense group which splits up only in higher resolutions. The GeCube card is quick in this test, and, at overclocked frequencies, is very close to the GeForce FX 5900 XT in 1280x1024, in spite of the faster memory bus of the latter card. The multimedia combo did well under the heavier load, delivering the performance of a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra at the regular clock rates and even more at overclocking.
The Torlan level abounds in open spaces and textures, but Metallurgy is on the contrary interesting for its sophisticated geometry and restricted freedom. The overclocked All-In-Wonder 9600 XT feels best of all here, followed by the GeForce FX 5900 XT. The former boasts a super-high core clock rate, and the latter is aided with its fast vertex processors and the eight-pipeline architecture. The graphics cards with fast memory – GeForce FX 5900 XT and GeForce FX 5700 – don’t feel the burden of the enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering. Only by overclocking the GeCube card we can make it competitive here.
Graphics cards with GPUs made by ATI Technologies have traditionally been strong in this next-generation game. Our today’s testing session confirms this fact once more.
The second next-generation game favors cards that quickly process geometric information. These are GeForce FX cards among the today’s participants. Anyway, the cards from ATI strike back in the eye-candy mode. What’s more, the overclocked GeCube All-In-Wonder 9600 XT competes on equal terms with the GeForce FX 5900 XT, save for the 1600x1200 resolution where the wider memory bus of the latter card puts it beyond competition.
Far Cry extensively uses complex pixel shaders and favors graphics cards with chips from ATI Technologies. The GeForce FX 5900 XT only wins one mode: 1600x1200 with enabled FSAA and AF.
Once again, the GeCube ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 XT is on top, like the rest of the ATI cards. It is especially clear in the eye-candy mode – even the GeForce 5900 XT gives up the fight. As usual, the only exception is the 1600x1200 resolution where the graphics memory bandwidth is the crucial factor.
The speed of processing geometry data is most important for Firestarter, so the overclocked GeCube All-In-Wonder RADEON 9600 XT, the GeForce FX 5900 XT and the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra are the fastest here. All the cards perform similarly in the eye-candy mode, save for the overclocked GeCube and the GeForce FX 5900 XT.
The GeCube All-In-Wonder 9600 XT is just a little slower than the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra at its regular frequencies and a little faster at overclocked ones.
The GeCube All-In-Wonder RADEON 9600 XT is once again victorious both at its regular and overclocked frequencies. And again the 1600x1200 resolution became an exception – the GeForce FX 5900XT wins it.
There’s no sense in discussing the results – the fps rates are too low. However, the overclocked multimedia combo finds itself on top once again.
All the graphics cards produce similar results in this test, only the GeForce FX 5900XT, a product of a higher class, wouldn’t fit into the picture. After enabling FSAA and AF, we see the GeCube All-In-Wonder RADEON 9600 XT becoming the leader.
It’s the same as in Star Wars: KOTOR – you can’t play this game at the maximum graphics quality settings on these graphics cards.
The GeCube card enjoys running this car simulator, especially at overclocked frequencies. You can play this game comfortably, but only without enabling FSAA and AF.
All the participants achieve similar results, save for the out-dated All-In-Wonder RADEON 9600 PRO. The overclocked GeCube is very close to the GeForce FX 5900 XT.
The multimedia card is rivaling the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra in this test and wins at the overclocked frequencies. In the eye-candy mode, the GeCube is the second best, after the GeForce FX 5900XT.
As you see, you can gain much by overclocking the GeCube All-In-Wonder 9600 XT: there’s only a gap of 131 points between it and the GeForce FX 5900XT in 3DMark03.
The first gaming test is hardly interesting anymore: a majority of modern games use more advanced rendering techniques, employing all the features of the current GPUs. Note though that the results of the GeCube All-In-Wonder RADEON 9600 XT nearly match those of the ordinary RADEON 9600 XT.
All the cards are equally slow in the second gaming test with a certain advantage to the GeForce FX that can process shadows more quickly. Anyway, the GeCube and the RADEON 9600 XT deliver a higher performance than the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra in the pure-performance mode, but lose to it in the eye-candy mode.
The second and third gaming tests are practically identical as concerns the method of rendering the scene, so the results are about the same.
Graphics cards that can quickly process complex pixel shaders have always won the fourth test. I mean RADEONs, of course, and the results bring no surprises. The eight pipelines and the wide memory bus cannot help the GeForce FX 5900 XT here: it is impeded by its very architecture.
Overall, the performance of the GeCube All-In-Wonder 9600 XT multimedia combo is on the level of the ordinary RADEON 9600 XT with minor variations from game to game. We discussed the latter GPU in our numerous articles, and there’s no need to repeat ourselves once more. Just refer to our reviews in the Video section of the site.
As for the product at large, the new version of the All-In-Wonder remains the most function-rich multimedia combo in the market among its peers. It is the best choice for people who are willing to transform their PCs into a multimedia center, which would also allow playing modern 3D games. Of course, you may soon find the RV360 processor unable to run upcoming titles, but so far it provides enough performance to play a majority of games, if you don’t go for too-high resolutions and don’t enable FSAA.
The sensitivity of the high-frequency tuner is rather low, but this only becomes a problem when you receive the TV signal from an air antenna or when the local cable TV network is poor. The product deserves our praises and we honestly recommend it to any user.
Highs:
Lows: