Digital Trends

ATI All-In-Wonder X600 Pro

January 17th, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Introduction

The ATI All-In-Wonder X600 Pro is ATI's latest addition to their All-In-Wonder product line and comes with a PCI-Express interface. Combining enough features to appeal to both gamers and multimedia enthusiasts, the All-In-Wonder X600 Pro is the Swiss army knife of video cards. Although the All-In-Wonder X600 Pro comes with built-in PVR functionality and Guide Plus+ for the television guide, ATI's own TV Elite Wonder was just announced weeks ago promising even better picture quality. Can the $249 dollar All-In-Wonder X600 Pro stand on its own for long?

Features and Design

We have seen very few PCI-Express based graphics cards enter the market place. Sure, several companies have announced products based on the new bus interconnect, but manufacturing has been slow and stock is hard to find. When it comes to multimedia based graphics cards using the PCI-Express bus, they are even far and fewer. The All-In-Wonder X600 Pro located right in the middle of ATI's All-In-Wonder product line with the more power X800 XT All-In-Wonder priced several hundred dollars higher than the X600 Pro.

The ATI All-In-Wonder X600 Pro

The All-In-Wonder (AIW) X600 Pro includes the same .13 micron Radeon chip found in their X600 product line and provides a native 16-lane PCI-Express bus interconnect allowing it to transfer data between the VPU and CPU in both directions simultaneously. The X600 Pro AIW comes with 256MB of memory and supports DirectX 9 Shader Model 2.0 for games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Also located on the graphics board is ATI's Theater 200 audio/video chip. This chop comes with a 2D 3-line comb filter and a 12 bit analog-to-digital converter.

The X600 Pro AIW supports dual monitor outfits using both the DVI and analog VGA output, although ATI does not provide a VGA to DVI adapter, so you will have to purchase the adapter separately if you have two monitors with DVI interfaces.

If you plan on hooking your PC up to a home theater system, ATI includes two connection blocks which you can stack on top of each other. These connection blocks plug into the dongle.  The dongle screws into the back of the ATI's X600 Pro All-In-Wonder card providing a more secure connection than previous All-In-Wonder cards we have seen. Both connection blocks support S-Video and RCA composite connections. If you want component video support you will have to upgrade to the X800 XT All-In-Wonder card. ATI does not provide any cables with this package so you will have to purchase them separately.

Software Package

ATI's X600 Pro All-In-Wonder comes with one of the best software packages we have seen for a multimedia focused card. ATI includes their own Multimedia Center software which includes their media player and several technologies designed to help improve the image coming from the analog cable broadcast. And, because their media player supports RealMedia, DivX and Microsoft Windows Media Video 9 codecs, there is little reason to switch to other media players unless of course you are not happy with the ATI software. ATI's software also supports an integrated FM tuner, DVD and recorded video playback using their PVR feature.

Using Guide Plus+ for the television guide software, you can see what is playing across 125-channels (depending on your cable operator.) You can also choose to record shows using the ATI scheduler program. When you select a show to record you have the option to record it at various levels of quality. When video is being played you can also Zoom-in, Pan or freeze a live broadcasting.

Other software which ATI includes with their X600 Pro All-In-Wonder includes Pinnacle Studio 9 which allows you to create your own movies, Matchware Mediator 7 which is used to create HTML and Flash presentations, Muvee Autoproduce which is used to create music videos from audio and video content, and Visual Communicator Web which is supposed to emulate TV studio software allowing you to create TV broadcasts including effects and teleprompter screens.