ATI ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON, (32 MB) PCI Video Card

I purchased the product for my Windows machine for running games. It was bought at the same time as the Abit KT7-RAID motherboard and the AMD Thunderbird 850 processor (as recommended by Anandtech's web site).

My intention was to use the 3D acceleration for games and occasional TV & DVD viewing in the computer room. My other choices at the time were Nvidia GeForce2 and Voodoo5. I chose the ATI card based on a few factors - image quality and clarity, bang per buck, 3D acceleration speed and viability for playing the new generation of games for some time. ATI edged out the other cards in all categories but one - 3D acceleration. GeForce2 seemed to offer slightly better acceleration. I went with the ATI for best all around performance.

All seemed well before the purchase, even a review at Anandtech's site seemed to show that the card was golden. Unfortunately, reality was far from the reviews. (Did Anandtech lose credibility? For this reader, yes. From now on, I will view all of Anandtech articles with some caution) From day one, I had a very severe problem related to a conflict between the Radeon AIW card and the motherboard. The current stable drivers prevented the TV application from working. It would consistently result in hangs. I did an article search on dejanews.com and came up with a number of hits regarding driver problem between the Radeon AIW and the Abit KT7-RAID motherboard. I downloaded their "special" version (beta) driver and it appears to have fixed the TV problem, but the DVD playback is no longer working.

I have been checking ATI's web site over a few weeks, and the rate of their driver update is very disappointing. The web site apparently focuses more on telling their visitors how many "design wins" they have over actually helping the customers. If you have an AMD CPU supporting motherboard, I would recommend waiting for ATI to get their act together on the driver update. On the other hand, if you have an Intel CPU motherboard, you might have a better luck.

One additional thing I want to comment on is ATI's claim of this video card being a possible substitute for a harddrive VCR, such as Tivo or Replay. I have an extremely fast harddrive in my system (benchmarks prove this) and the ATI's software for recording a TV program produced frequent pauses in the TV program. It was completely unusable. Straight recording without watching the TV did produce an acceptable recording but the recording was visually inferior to the original broadcast. I would also like to let a potential user know that the TV Guide like software included with the video card suffers from a severe problem - the website that provides the guide is very often down. More often than not I end up surfing the TV channels without any guide. It's too bad, because when it works, it's really great.

The question that you might now be asking is, why am I still recommending this product and rate it at 4? The reason is that the 3D acceleration is very solid. I haven't had any problems with the driver in this regard, and the quality of the render is superb. If you shop around, this product doesn't cost much more than the non AIW 32MB version of the Radeon card. For people who think they can wait for ATI to someday address the driver problems, it might still be worth paying somewhat more for the AIW version.

Finally, I want to advise all who are reading the reviews on this website to exercise some caution. Nobody would really use terms such as "award winning ..." in their normal conversation. Yes, I'm blatantly suggesting that these other postings are manufacturer posted "reviews." Please use your best judgement. What you're seeing here is reviews pre-posted by the manufacturer prior to the release of the product and an onslaught of REAL reviews by the users, complete with problems and actual experiences, as the product becomes available in the retail channel.