Digital Trends

ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro July 29th, 2003 | by Douglas Hall

The bigger the screen.....

Some how, the opportunity to benchmark on the television is something that we could not resist, nor should we.

More Quake 3 benchmarking

Testing went smoothly and no problems were encountered, the cabling and hardware worked flawlessly every time. Since the launch pad refused to load at start up, we had to go into the properties after every reboot and enable the TV again. 

The ALL-IN-Wonder 9800 Pro we tested ran at 135 to 143 continuously no matter the ambient temperature. Not too hot at all compared to some of the other cards seen here recently. The processor doesn't seem to overheat despite the speed and the comparatively small heat sink.

Capturing video is incredibly simple. Anytime within the TV application, you can click on the camera icon in the control interface and capture whatever is displayed on the TV screen. The image is immediately displayed in the Stills gallery that pops-up right after you capture something, and double clicking on it will produce an image viewer where you can edit, save, print or other wise interact with the picture in a variety of ways.

The Launch Pad on-screen application bar has numerous buttons for accessing the VCD, CD player, DVD player, TV listings (by local area code) Media library and file player for playing saved files including .VCR files (ATI saved digital VCR files) as well as MPEG, MP2, AVI, MP3 and .WAV files from your hard drive.

HydraVision, the ATI desk top management tool, will allow you to manage multiple desk tops on the same monitor. It includes a magnifier which will clearly enlarge any portion of the screen indicated. Here is a screen shot. This is a standard 4x shot of the desktop which is set at a 1280x1024 resolution. You can save it to an .RTF file on the desktop and use it as you might any clip image.

Desktop management in HydraVision is configurable via the properties dialog box and simple to use, though tedious to initially configure for more than 2 desktops.

The ATI Remote Wonder has 6 programmable buttons and plug-ins for Gemstar guideplus+ as well as the multi-media library and a power point-plug-in as well. Mouse properties for the Remote Wonder are also adjustable. Options include power settings and the ATI Remote Wonder is addressable to keep other units from interfering with it.

DVD playback was smooth and averaged CPU usage of 10% during play back. The DVD of choice was the Scorpion King. Only once did the voices not match the movie for a moment. The ATI WinDVD version bundled with the ATI ALL-IN-WONDER compliments the theater 200 chipset well. Even the full screen mode used no more than 13% CPU usage on the average and has the same capture feature that the TV and file player use. When taking screen capturing we saw that it ran the CPU utilization up to 62% on our 3000+ Barton rig momentarily but returned to the typical 10% afterwards. The ALL-IN-Wonder 9800 Pro really seems handle the applications well without shrugging off the processing to the CPU.

Never touch the bow. Click on the picture for a larger image

The CD player is pretty basic and sounds good over our onboard 5.1 on the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard. Hooking up the sound to the main system on the Sony 51” certainly reproduced the effects well and has  not used much more system resources than play back on the monitor has (around 2% gain on average).

Conclusion

Overall, we have to say that the All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro is one of the finest examples of functionality and performance we have ever had the pleasure of testing. Since things have certainly heated up in the video card wars as of late, we shall see the extent of the tenure this will hold. ATI has out done itself with this one and proves once again what it's like to be the king for a reason. Though a bit pricey for the everyday gamer and casual web surfer, nothing we have seen can match it's power and features. Everything clicked with this one except the price, but somehow I think that since this card is targeted on the PC enthusiast market and not just gamers or videophiles that things will work out for the best for whomever might purchase this awesome card.