Digital Trends

ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 DV April 17th, 2003 | by Ian Bell

On paper the new ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV could be the perfect video card of its day. With its Radeon core technology and the heavy multimedia capabilities, the ATI AIW 8500DV is great for gaming as well as just about anything else multimedia related.

The ATI AIW uses the same Radeon core technology present in the Radeon 8500, but the 8500DV runs slower than the regular 8500, a card which is geared more towards gamers. The 8500 runs with a core speed of 275 MHz and a memory clock speed of 550 MHz where the 8500DV runs on a 230MHz core and a 380 MHz memory clock. The differences are quite large and it boggles me as to why ATI would do this. The price of the AIW is substantially higher than the 8500 thus moving it out of the same market as the 8500.

While the core and memory speeds of the 8500 beat the 8500DV, where the 8500DV really shines is in its multimedia capabilities. The 8500DV has an onboard TV tuner, a Firewire (IEEE1394) port directly on the card, a DVI connector with a VGA converter packaged on the box, and a unique external adapter with inputs on one side of the dongle and outputs on the other side.

External Adapter

The external adapter box has on one side the following inputs:

- DV (IEEE1394) input leaving an extra one on the card itself for a total of 2 Firewire ports
- S-Video input
- Composite (RCA) Video inputs
- Right left Channel inputs (RCA)

The output jacks on the other side of the adapter consist of:

- Right/left (RCA) Channel out
- Composite (RCA) Video Out
- S-Video out
- S/PDIF Out

The adapter is relatively easy to configure and connects to a proprietary jack on the back of the 8500DV card. There are two audio jacks on the adapter allowing you to hook up computer speakers via a pass-through cable. In essence, you can hear any audio plugged into the adapter through your computer speakers. I found the adapter jack on the back of the card to be somewhat flimsy, often coming unconnected from the video card itself. Other than the pins themselves there does not seem to be any sort of lock mechanism to keep the adapter plugged in.

Software and Manuals

I found the software that comes with the 8500DV very complimenting to the card. There is a nice mix of multimedia software with gaming software, highlighting both the cards multimedia and gaming abilities. ATI uses their own proprietary software to control the multimedia aspects of the card and after years of making their own software, there could not be anything better developed for this card.

Called the “Multimedia Center”, the aforementioned proprietary software is some of the best on the market. Both extremely user friendly with integrated pop-up windows and help guides, there is little left to be confused about. The TV and DVD software has some of the best visual playback I have seen to date. While the integrated help guides are great for troubleshooting, I found the user manual to be lacking.

About one inch thick, you would think this manual to be detailed down to the smallest detail, yet when opened you would quickly find the manual to be thick for a reason. It houses instructions in 6 languages and for 3 generations of AIW cards, the All-In-Wonder, the All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 and the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV. All three cards have different features and abilities, so expect a lot of confusion when reading this manual. With hard-to-read diagrams and the confusion of separating the 3 cards, I would recommend sitting down patiently and reading through the manual many times so you can understand things. There is also a separate Multimedia Center Guide to help with the software aspects of the card.

I found the Multimedia Center to be a lot better in its explanation of the included software. Presented in only one language and representing one suite of software, the guide explained very clearly how to use the included software.

Overall I found it odd how the Multimedia Center's user guide was so strong while the Radeon 8500DV user manual was very unclear and could use some major improvements.