ATI All-In-Wonder® 9800 PRO, (128 MB) AGP Video Card

I've just upgraded to the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card after using the nearly-identical AIW 9000 Pro in my home desktop PC for the last 2 years (yes, I'm a bit behind the bleeding edge – I prefer a mainstream bargain!). I already reviewed the AIW 9000 Pro earlier, so I'll concentrate this review on the differences in the AIW 9800 Pro, and my impressions from using the AIW for the last 2 years.

The 9800 is so similar to the 9000 that I was able to just swap the boards and plug in all the existing A/V cables. It turns out I could even have used the same driver software, although I didn't realize that initially (see below). It looked like an easy and painless performance upgrade, which was enough to persuade me to upgrade in the AIW model line even though I've cursed ATI's buggy software and abominable upgrade procedures many times in the last two years, sometimes swearing that I'd never buy another ATI product.

Maybe I should have listened to that voice telling me not to do it! I made the mistake of taking one source's word that the 9800 Pro requires the latest ATI Multimedia Centre version 9 software based on .Net, a bulky upgrade I've tried to avoid for the 9000 Pro. Oh well, so be it. Knowing from hard experience that ATI requires that all old software be uninstalled first, not upgraded in place, I uninstalled my current 9000 Pro drivers and MMC 8.9 software and rebooted in default VGA mode before running the installation CDROM supplied with the AIW 9800 Pro. Only to discover that it actually contains even older MMC 8.4 software and outdated drivers older than the ones I was using! I had to uninstall all of that, download all new software versions from ATI in 6 parts totaling around 200 Mbytes, and re-install everything again in sequence. Then as usual I had to fix the dozens of video and Windows settings that were altered by the installation (e.g., desktop settings changed and all the icons re-arranged, Windows login options changed, video settings changed, ATI Player took over all media file associations without asking, installed 3 unnecessary resident programs and two Windows services to run automatically etc., etc.). Afterwards everything seemed to work, although I've yet to try to clean up the hundreds of redundant files left behind.

Now I have the new ATI Catalyst Control Center installed, which appears in place of the old ATI Control Panel for video Properties. It turns out that ATI is still offering both versions, although that's not clear on their support web site. Aside from requiring .Net and taking up a whole lot more system resources, I'm not sure that the new Catalyst Control Center offers much of an advantage over the old Control Panel. The Catalyst Control Center is a bit more graphical, showing interactive sample 3-D graphics and video to allow you to see the real-time effect of options. It's rearranged to offer better access to more 3D graphics options of the Radeon card, although as usual the options are poorly explained and it's difficult to know how you would use most of them. On the downside, it either needs to be running all the time, or else it takes a full 60 seconds to launch from scratch. Given the many other improvements customers have been asking for in ATI's software features and reliability, I think it qualifies as a pointless waste of both ATI's development resources and my system resources, but it's otherwise fairly harmless. Apparently you can still uninstall the Catalyst Control Center and revert to the old Control Panel if you really prefer.

The AIW 9800 Pro and my older AIW 9000 Pro are almost identical in appearance and features, except for the higher graphics performance of the 9800 – and the 9800 card is red instead of green. They share the same set of connectors and breakout cables, the same card layout and back panel, the same TV codec, and the same bundle with the original Remote Wonder RF remote control and all the same accessories. They even have the same documentation and run the same PC software. Actually it's a little disappointing that this package didn't have some of the improvements found in the more recent and lower-cost AIW 9600XT package, like the Remote Wonder version II controller with longer range, FM radio support, or dual-VGA capability. But in my case performance and compatibility won out over features.

Note that the suffix on ATI's models is an important performance indicator – the "Pro" suffix indicates that it's faster than the base model, and the "XT" suffix indicates that it's faster again – but a 9800 Pro is still faster than a 9600XT. The All-In-Wonder version adds a bundle of additional TV and video features to the base graphics card. The additional features add less than $50 to the price, so they are well worth it if you want them.

I originally bought the All-In-Wonder for the great bundle of video features, and I still find it impressive:

- TV, composite video, S-Video and stereo audio input
- On-board TV tuner with CATV input
- Real-time MPEG video digitizing and recording (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and now MPEG-4 as well with the latest software)
- Composite, S-Video and stereo audio output (and now HD component video as well with the 9800)
- Digital audio pass-through via SPDIF output
- Dual-screen support, DVI or analog VGA output simultaneously with video output to a TV monitor
- Picture-In-Picture support (Video input window on VGA monitor), with adjustable transparency
- Software bundle including ATI Personal Video Recorder, Pinnacle Studio 8 video editor, ATI DVD player and a few others

I've made heavy use of most of these features, and everything works pretty much as it should aside from the many software bugs with ATI's MMC software. Video performance is unchanged between the AIW 9000 Pro and the AIW 9800 Pro. My Athlon XP 2500+ CPU is fast enough to keep up with real-time MPEG video digitizing at full-frame size and 30fps rate (it's not hardware assisted). The color accuracy and resolution of ATI's video digitizing hardware seems generally comparable to other low-cost hardware I've seen – not as good as pro equipment, but adequate for my purposes. Video output to a TV monitor is excellent – clear and stable. Note that you must read and understand the obscure documentation on Display Cloning to make the right settings to see your video on a TV instead of getting a blank window.

In terms of 3d graphics performance, the 128 Mbyte 9800 Pro rates about 3x faster than my earlier 64 Mbyte 9000 Pro, although it obviously varies a lot depending on the particular advanced 3D graphics features used by the game or other application software (see the VGA performance charts at http://www.tomshardware.com for extensive comparative benchmarks). The 9800 Pro is roughly comparable in performance to the nVidia 5900 Ultra – maybe a little better in some cases. In practical terms, the 9800 Pro's performance is sufficient to play Doom3 smoothly at 1024 x 768, while the 9000 Pro doesn't work well even at 640 x 480. According to various comparison tests I've seen, the AIW version is just as fast as the regular 9800 non-AIW version, although there are rare occasions when the extra memory of the 256 Mbyte version might help performance on a particular game. I've never tried overclocking either AIW card – I can't see that the very small performance gain would be worth the extra heat and potential video glitches.

Both the 9000 and the 9800 have a small onboard fan, but it's fairly quiet compared to the other fans in my system. Since the 9800 has more memory and a higher clock rate, and it requires its own power supply connection, I presume that it consumes more power and generates more heat than the 9000. But in practice I haven't noticed any effect on my system case temperature, and my 350w power supply seems to handle things just fine.

Other minor differences from the AIW 9000 Pro to the AIW 9800 pro:

- Direct connection to power supply plug now required due to higher power requirement (Y connector supplied, min 350w power supply recommended)
- AGP 8x support (card requires at least AGP 4x and 1.5 volt signaling support)
- Additional breakout cable supplied for HDTV component video output (Y Pr Pb), plugs into the A/V Out socket in place of the regular A/V Out cable
- Direct digital audio output to the sound card WAV channel is supported, Line In or internal Aux cable no longer required (with the latest driver software)
- A few additions to the software bundle: Muvee Autoproducer (an automated video production program), Matchware Mediator 7 (for preparing animated presentations), and a full version of game The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind

The original Remote Wonder radio remote control is unchanged. It works fine at short range, but put a few walls in the way and it quickly gets erratic. Don't expect to control the PC in another room of the house unless it's very close. I found that adding an extension to the short antenna wire on the USB plug-in receiver helps the range a little.

ATI's MultiMedia Center (MMC) software hasn't been improved significantly through many releases. The latest version 9.08 remains buggy and often awkward to use. I'm more experienced using it now, but at least half the time I find it has crashed or failed to record scheduled programs for unknown reasons when I leave it running in PVR mode. Other examples of problems: it detects spurious conflicts between weekly scheduled programs and one-time scheduled programs, apparently because it can't do date calculations correctly; editing the time of an existing schedule entry causes it to revert to the default TV input, even if the source entry still reads "Composite video" (anyone care for a 2-hour recording of snow?).

The Radeon drivers are updated frequently by ATI, and the release notes always mention plenty of bugs with the latest video games. But really I've never had much problem with the AIW 9000 Pro failing to work with a new game, as most games seem to be thoroughly tested with the ATI Radeon cards. More complaint-worthy is the gruesome driver update procedure, which takes a lot of time and effort and normally messes up the desktop settings.

The Pinnacle Studio 8 software included with both my versions of the AIW is handy as a full-featured timeline/storyboard-based video editor, and it can capture video from Firewire camcorders and create VCDs and DVDs as well. I've used it quite a bit, with good success aside from occasional crashes and bugs – no more than par for the course with any video editing software. But it's a limited "ATI Special Edition" with many advanced features disabled, and it can't be upgraded to the current Studio 9 version.

The ATI DVD player software works fine, but unlike Nero Showtime it can't seem to pass digital Dolby 5.1 signals through to the SPDIF output connector of the sound card – you must switch the digital audio cable to the SPDIF output of the ATI card. It also applies Macrovision copy protection to the video output if the Macrovision flag is present on the DVD. ATI claims that there's a hardware assist on MPEG-2 decoding, but if so it's undetectable.

At least with the latest drivers the AIW 9800 Pro no longer requires a cable to be connected from the audio output of the AIW to the Line In or internal Aux In of the sound card. ATI has apparently discovered how to pass digital audio through directly to the WAV output of the sound card, at least for the 9600 and later cards. But they don't mention that in their documentation or on their support web site – instead they continue to give outdated instructions telling users to select the sound card connector on the Audio Configuration page of the Initialization Wizard – a page which no longer appears in the software.

So in the end my AIW 9800 Pro upgrade was successful, giving me the 3D performance upgrade I wanted. The only downside is that there are no significant improvements in the AIW video features, or in the bundle of software and accessories between the two. And the ATI MMC software remains as problematic as ever.