ATI All-in-Wonder 9600 XT
Down pat

The All-in-Wonder 9600 XT is just one option in a full stable of AIW products that stretches from the lowly Radeon 7500-based All-in-Wonder VE to the high-end All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro with numerous stops in between. ATI's AIW lineup is so stacked that the AIW 9600 XT is one of three Radeon 9600-based All-in-Wonders; AIW versions of the 9600 and 9600 Pro are also available.

ATI's deep AIW lineup and wealth of experience with multimedia graphics cards suggests that the AIW 9600 XT will be a strong contender, but that lineup and experience may also raise unrealistic expectations for the card. As the Los Angeles Lakers will tell you, expectations can be tough to fulfill, especially against a hungry underdog.

The AIW 9600 XT isn't much to look at, but since case windows generally don't make their way into home theater PCs, having an aesthetically appealing card isn't high on the priority list. Noise levels are a priority, though. The AIW 9600 XT features a larger heat sink than its AIW-less counterparts and comes equipped with a low-noise fan. Although the card's heat sink appears to cover memory chips mounted on the top of the board as well, there's actually no contact between the two.

Speaking of memory, the AIW 9600 XT comes with 128MB spread across eight BGA Samsung K4D263238E-GC2A DDR SDRAM chips. The chips are rated for operation at 350MHz (700MHz if we take into account DDR's clock-doubling properties), but they're only clocked at an effective 650MHz on the card. The 650MHz memory clock is actually 50MHz higher than the vanilla Radeon 9600 XT, whose memory runs at an effective 600MHz.

ATI's All-in-Wonder clock speed fiddling isn't limited to the 9600 XT's memory; the card's core clock speed is running at 525MHz—25MHz faster than a stock Radeon 9600 XT. Years ago, ATI clocked AIW cards slower than vanilla graphics products, so it's interesting to see the reverse happening here. For more information on the AIW 9600 XT's RV360 graphics core, including its pixel pipelines and "Black Magic" low-k manufacturing process, see our Radeon 9600 XT review.

ATI uses an analog tuner from Philips to capture cable TV and FM radio signals. Silicon tuners with digital circuitry are technically capable of higher capture quality and faster channel switching, something that ATI was eager to point out when they had a digital tuner on the Radeon 8500DV. However, the relatively poor quality of cable TV feeds doesn't really take advantage of a digital tuner's potential for better picture quality. The AIW 9600 XT's analog tuner isn't slow to change channels, either.

Analog might be good enough for cable TV, but for other video capture tasks, the AIW 9600 XT relies on ATI's Theater 200 video decoder chip. ATI uses the Theater 200 liberally in its All-in-Wonder lineup, even in the high-end AIW 9800 Pro.

The Rage Theater 200 features dual 12-bit analog-to-digital converters and adaptive comb filters. The chip supports composite and S-Video streams, which ATI hooks up with a Barney-purple input dongle.

On the output side of things, ATI uses a second dongle. Thankfully, this one is black.

The AIW 9600 XT's output dongle handles all the card's outputs, including a couple of VGA ports. DVI doesn't factor into the equation, but the card at least supports multimonitor configurations right out of the box. The card also supports composite and S-Video outputs, but it'll cost you $30 to buy the component HDTV output adapter from ATI. Even if you add the cost of the HDTV adapter, the AIW 9600 XT is still cheaper than the Personal Cinema FX 5700, so I'm not inclined to complain. However, I should note that the HDTV adapter will eat up one of the card's VGA outputs.

With its input and output ports spread over two dongles, the AIW 9600 XT's PCI back plate looks a little odd. I won't complain about the lack of dual DVI outputs (for once), but a single DVI port might be useful in some home theater setups.