|  I recently bought the ATI ALL-IN-WONDER video card from Amazon.com for $199. I was initially very excited because I loved the thought of buying a piece of hardware that could serve as a TV and FM tuner, PVR, Video Composite input box (so I can play my video game consoles on the PC and digitize all my family videos), as well as serving as a upper mid-range graphics card. It was like killing five birds with one stone. Since the two weeks I have received and played with the video card, here is the verdict: The multimedia capabilities of this card is third rate and incredibly buggy. However the graphics capabilities of this card is first rate. And ATI customer support sucks. The multimedia capabillities of this card was disappointing from the start. My TV reception would freeze after ten minutes of normal viewing. It would be like I was watching a slideshow. The radio reception was lost after 5 minutes and would be replaced by loud static. The card also did not recognize my camcorder or VCR or XBox when I had it properly installed. Contributing to this plethora of problems was the sparse documentation that was included. It is amazing to me that ATI could not spend a little more effort providing more thorough instructions in their user guides. They could have saved soooooo much money on customer support. Because of the lack of documentation, I had great trouble. Compounding this grave error on ATI's part was their phone customer support. Now phone support is free for 30 days for customers who have registered their product. But their phone number is a number in Canada. Thank God, I have Vonage phone service (Calls to Canada are free) because I was put on hold for 45 minutes. I could only imagine the anguish of other callers who had to foot the long distance bill. But to the credit of their phone support, I was given good advice on how to solve two of my problems. The TV reception problem was solved by removing all the ATI drivers that I had installed that was on their included CD-ROM and installing all the latest drivers that were on their website. They also gave me advice to solve the problem of my card not recognizing my camcorder/xbox/vcr that should have been in the damn user guide the first place. |
| The only problem that remained unsolved was the radio static problem. I looked up in various internet forums and found out that many other ATI AIW 9600XT owners experienced the same thing. In conclusion, the multimedia capabilities of the card is unbelieveably unpolished. That is the definitive word: unpolished. I was thinking of buying the ATI HDTV Remote Wonder card to pair it up with, but my poor experience with their product has me thinking otherwise. Nvidia, indeed, has the room to wiggle into the multimedia card sector.The graphics capabilities of this card was sweet. It was the only reason I did not return the card. | ATI deserves their reputation has a great graphics card company because on this front, I was very satisfied. I played Halo all the way through at the highest resolution with all the extras using their Catalyst driver 4.7. I will be buying Doom III soon and using Catalyst 4.9 to play it. From what I have read, I expect good results. My recommendation to you all is to avoid ATI AIW 9600XT and buy the regular ATI 9600XT. Save yourself the $50 and the accompanying headache that the "multimedia" capabilities of the card will give you. |
