This card does it all! Read on...
Written: May 18 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Video Capture, Hardware DVD decoding, TV tuner, Good gaming graphics
Cons: No hardware AVI to MPEG converter
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| eric_mason_34's Full Review: ATI All-in-Wonder® 128, (32 MB) PCI Video Car... |
I have recently purchased an ATI All-In-Wonder 128, and I definitely am satisfied with this card. First of all, the card has the best features for any accelerator card in its price range. I purchased the 32mb card, as I wanted to use it for games as well as video purposes.
First off. This card replaces three former cards I had in my computer prior to my purchase. I previously owned an All-In-Wonder Pro, and 2 Voodoo2 cards in an SLI configuration. This card pretty much combines all the aspects of those three cards into one, as well as adds on some other things that I never had before.
The card captures composite and s-vhs video very well, as well as having both composite and s-vhs outputs. I liked the fact that ATI uses a little docking device with a long cord for the inputs, as I'm sure a lot of people were getting tired of plugging their camcorders in the backs of their computers frequently. TV tuning is excellent, and snapshots are a very nice convienence. However, the neatest thing I noticed about this card is that not only can it capture video in AVI format, but it also can capture in MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 through a hardware encoding chip. (smart move ATI!)
DVD decoding is nothing short of what you might expect from ATI, as the card is flawless in playing my favorite DVDs.
As for gaming, the 128 bit Rage accelerator does just fine in any OpenGL game. Coupled with 32 megs of onboard RAM, this card performs just as good, if not better than my voodoo2 SLI rig did. (since V2 doesn't support OGL). Besides, Glide is becoming a thing of the past, so I figured openGL is the way to go.
The only gripe I have about this card is there is no way to take advantage of the hardware MPEG encoding chip to convert an AVI into an MPEG using the on-board encoding chip. If there is such a program that utilizes this, please, please, please e-mail me and tell me where I can get it, since software MPEG encoder/converters are usually very slow, and don't have the same quality that a hardware encoder can produce.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
eric_mason_34
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Reviews written: 23
Trusted by: 3 members
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