Digital Trends

ATI All-In-Wonder X600 Pro

January 17th, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Installing the All-In-Wonder X600 Pro can take quite a bit of time depending on your computer and home theater setup. Please sit down and read the instructions thoroughly. We recommend going to ATI's website and searching for the newest drivers and software updates as they may help fix any problems you may find with this card or software.

Plugging in the All-In-Wonder X600 Pro provided to be very simple. It does not require an external power source and is able to run using your computers PCI-Express connection. After we plugged in our card, we powered up our Windows XP based system to install the drivers. Windows will recognize the card and ask for its drivers. We recommend hitting cancel until the operating system stops prompting you for the software. At this time, put in the ATI software CD and load it up. Software installation, including the cards drivers, took about 10 minutes to load on our system. Once software installation was done, we rebooted our machine. ATI's software did not appear to slow down the startup time of our test system, which is a good thing.

Once Windows is loaded you will notice a big tool bar that clings to the right hand side of your desktop. This toolbar serves as the quick launch for all of the features your All-In-Wonder X600 Pro card is capable of. Simply click on the corresponding button to launch the application of your choice.

For our tests we used Comcast analog cable for our video signal. A warning: the All-In-Wonder X600 Pro does not support digital cable or satellite broadcasts, only analog cable feeds. So if you have either of the latter services, you are out of luck.

Guide Plus+ is used for your television guide. Upon starting it up, simply tell it what your zip code is and what type of station listings you have. We found Guide Plus+ to be a very powerful application, but it is slow to load and looks very outdated. The grey background is not very appealing and the low-resolution ads it loads on the left hand side of the guide window look very ugly. We were hoping that ATI would try to improve the interface and look of the Guide Plus+ software. Using Guide Plus+ you are able to record whatever show you want by right clicking on the show name and choosing record.

The Guide Plus+ interface looks outdated

Once you select the show you want to watch, double clicking on it in the guide will load the broadcast in ATI's own media player software. Once the video is playing you can zoom in, pan around the broadcast or choose to freeze it for that special bathroom break. The ATI player works well, but again its Graphical User Interface (GUI) could still be better. The controls are not clearly marked and you are force to click on a hidden volume bar that curves with the players interface — overall it could be more intuitive. We noticed an appealing feature that when muted, closed captioning would show up over the video. What we didn't like was how many misspelled words showed up while the closed captioning was being played.

ATI's Media Player

TV being broadcast and displayed over your computer's monitor looks as good as anything else we have seen from the likes of Hauppauge Sigma Designs. Last week, while in CES, ATI gave us a presentation of their new TV Wonder Elite which actually made an analog broadcast look more like an HDTV signal than an analog one. We were more impressed with the $150 dollar TV Wonder Elite than we are with the television broadcast being played through the X600 Pro All-In-Wonder. The differences between the two products surround the new Theater 550 Pro chip which is in used in the TV Wonder Elite compared with the X600 Pro All-In-Wonder's older Theater 200 chip.

As we mentioned before, upgrading to the X800 XT all-In-Wonder will give you a better GPU for gaming, component video and HDTV support (without an HDTV tuner) and their Remote Wonder remote control, but overall the package costs about $200 more than the X600 Pro All-In-Wonder.