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Quality and Setup of the
ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 |
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Looking Good... |
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The Card:
As the
All-In-Wonder has matured over the years, the design of the
cards themselves have become more intricate and refined.
The engineers at ATi have done a fine job at integrating a
wide variety of components from the TV tuner and Rage
Theater chip, to the 128MB of DDR RAM, into a clean and
orderly PCB. They have also effectively tackled the
issue of connecting external components by way of an
external adapter, freeing up space on the card. At the
center of the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 is the Radeon 8500
GPU, running at 275MHz. At first we were happy to see
that the GPU had active cooling mounted on the it, however,
we soon found those good feelings began to fade. As
other manufacturers of video cards have been moving toward
the use of thermal grease and spring loaded heat sink
solutions on their GPUs, ATi has continued to use the
cheaper and less effective method of epoxy for attaching
their cooling package. In this reviewer's opinion,
this is unfortunate and a small strike against an otherwise
impressive design.
Click To
Enlarge
Four 32MB Infineon DDR SGRAM
chips are attached to the PCB with a newer semiconductor
packaging called BGA or "Ball Grid Array." This is a
more refined mounting process usually reserved for high-end
products such as Graphics Processors. The advantage of
the BGA over the traditional method of soldering the chips
to the board, is a smaller form factor that performs more
efficiently while running cooler than other "leaded" chips
and with better signal integrity for the most part.
The chips come clocked at 275MHz., yielding a DDR rate of
550MHz. What was interesting was that when we did a
little research on these particular Infineon memory chips,
we found that they are in fact rated for 300MHz. So
what this shows, is that ATi has opted to clock the RAM on
the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 less aggressively than the
original factory specification. Whether this was done
is in anticipation of a future release that would
incorporate the full speed of the chip is uncertain at this
time. But one thing is certain, we expect that the RAM
on the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 should overclock rather
well for us.
Before we get into overclocking
the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500, let's take a look at what is
involved in getting it installed and ready to roll.
Setup:
Thanks to clear,
easy-to-follow documentation, ATi has made the installation
of the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 simple enough for even the
most inexperienced user. The "Installation and Setup
User's Guide" gives simple to follow, step-by-step
procedures for installing the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 into
your PC. The "Cable Installation" diagram takes an
otherwise daunting task of connecting external components
and makes the procedure simple and understandable.
Once the hardware was in place, we inserted the Setup Disk,
clicked on "Easy Install" and followed the on-screen
instructions. With the software installed, we rebooted
the system and WindowsXP detected the new hardware,
assigning the proper drivers to each component of the
All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500.
With a little
preplanning, the total installation process couldn't have
take much more than 15 minutes. Then and we were
kicking back, flipping channels on the All-In-Wonder Radeon
8500 with its slick RF remote control. In fact, a few
short minutes after we were done setting up the AIW Radeon
8500, we had our television connected to the TV-Out of the
card. After we maximized the window to full screen, it
was impossible to tell the difference between the regular TV
signal and the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500's output.
Next, we dropped a DVD into our PC and the quality was
excellent; again we couldn't tell the difference between its
quality and the picture quality from a traditional DVD
player. It's easy for this reviewer to say that the
TV-Out quality of the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 is simply
that good.
Remote Control:
ATi has taken an
innovative approach to the Remote Control feature of the
All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500. Planning ahead for the user
who intends to use the TV out on a television in a room
separate from where the computer is located, they realized
that a traditional infrared remote wouldn't do the user any
good without a clear line of sight to the receiver. To
get around this hurdle, they developed a fully functional
remote control that functions solely on radio frequency.
While outputting the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 to our TV, we
easily sat on our comfy sofa and flipped through the
channels without the slightest delay. In fact, ATi
even worked in the ability to control the complete computer
system by implementing an easy to use mouse control via a
circular touch pad. Let's be clear though, you won't
want to replace your mouse with this remote control any time
soon, but it will eliminate the need for extra wires and
unnecessary trips to the computer.
One more quick
note about the remote control, while we were performing our
DVD tests, we chose to use PowerDVD over the default ATi DVD
player. This was simply a matter of preference since
this reviewer has been using various versions of the popular
player for a number of years now. We found that the
remote control worked the same with PowerDVD as it did with
the ATi Multimedia Center software without any additional
configuration. I can't comment on whether this will
work with other DVD products, but with PowerDVD, the remote
control worked beautifully. ATi has really pulled off
a great achievement with the creation of their RF remote
control and it continues to impress us with its versatility
everyday.
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Drivers of the
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 |
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Lots of Options. |
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Click To
Enlarge
ATi's driver
package has a wide arrangement of setting available to help
fine tune the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500's behavior in a
variety of different functions. Whether setting the
cards visual quality for Direct 3D or OpenGL based games, or
managing color adjustments and video output quality, the
driver package has the bases covered. ATi has done a
fine job at making all the available settings easy to
understand and readily accessible with a single click of the
taskbar icon.
In a matter of
moments, we were familiar with all of the options available
for the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 and proceeded to get
things set for a showdown in the benchmarking arena.
So, what do you say we take a quick look at some of the
features of the ATi Multimedia Center software package?
Then we'll see what the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 is made
of, when we put it to the test against nVidia's best.
Software and 3DMark2001SE
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