Radeon 9700 All-In-Wonder
- — 18 September, 2003 07:50
For gaming, TV and video on a personal computer, the 128MB DDR PowerColor Radeon 9700 All-In-Wonder graphics card is brilliant. It can be used for applications such as capturing TV (including time shifting) and video on your PC in AVI format or a wide range of MPEG formats for the creation of video clips that are then suitable for DVD or VCD creation.
Almost everything you need is featured in this PowerColor package, including a radio frequency (RF) remote control, and a breakout cable for easy access to video-in ports. The card has a standard cooling implementation for the Radeon 9700 chip itself and the mounting bracket includes connections for DVI, TV aerial, video-in and video-out cables.
TV can be watched in window mode, full screen mode, background desktop mode, or transparent windowed mode. The ATI toolbar provides easy access to all the applications the card and its associated software offer, such as the DVD player and Teletext software.
In my tests, the card proved to be potent for 3D gaming, registering high frame rates at high resolutions (1600x1200) in Quake III (212fps) and Unreal Tournament 3 (65fps in the Inferno map test). It was able to autodetect all five standard free-to-air Sydney channels via my rooftop antenna (although it took two attempts to detect the ABC), and it produced great video and audio playback.
ATI's HydraVision allows multiple desktop configurations and multiple display devices (monitor and TV) to be used. TV-out quality was very good for watching captured video files, but poor for reading text, even at a resolution of 1024x768.
In brief: PowerColor Radeon 9700 All-In-Wonder
This card can make your PC the cornerstone of all your entertainment devices by providing great video and TV functionality as well as top-of-the-line DirectX 9.0-compatible gaming. It is best suited to users who have a powerful PC (2.4GHz Pentium 4) and plenty of hard drive space (60GB and up).
Price: $891
Distributor: Australia IT
Phone: (03) 9543 5855
URL: www.australiait.com.au
