All In wonders

[WingWizard]

Was thinking about getting a 9700 pro AIW; I know the 9700 pro has awesome specs, but was just wondering if anyone has had experience w/the tv portion of the "all in wonder." Is it any good? I'll be going back to school in the fall and would like to record tv shows and such on my computer. Thanks!

[Redwolf]

I don't know from experience, but I have heard GREAT things about the AIW cards, always. That is, minus the price. The 9700 AIW is consitered to be next to heaven for video editers who also do 3d work and who program on the side.

[dauss]

I have one and its damn good. the tv in is really good too, but if you want to record, its easy too, but it just takes up massive amount of HD space depending on the quality, but you can just encode it to xvid or divx5 or something to make it smaller.

[no1_vern]

I have enjoyed my all-in-wonder ever since I got it back in Jan 2002. The (then new) 8500DV, has been running like a champ providing me with what I needed copying, editing, recording the shows/video I wanted. It is also a very good game card still. I dont expect to have to retire it until after Doom3 comes out or later if I can get a decent frame rate playing Doom3.

Vern

[Dazbo666]

I've recently upgraded from a 32mb AIW - it served me VERY well for over 3 years. The only reason I upgraded was because FPS gaming frame rates were seriously suffering with some of my newest games.... Splinter Cell, Vietcong, Line Of Sight etc.

And although it was a fantastic card, to be honest I probably still didn't use it to its full potential on the TV side.....
having said that, I was so impressed with the quality and reliability of my old card, that I transferred it into a second system, and replaced it with one of ots bigger brothers... the 9500 !

I know there's a lot of debate about the benefits between GeForce or Radeon, but personally, I'll stick with Radeon all the way!!

[lauroy8]

I just upgraded to the AIW 9700 PRO from the AIW 8500DV. The tuner in the 9700 is different from the one in the 8500 and in my opinion the tuner in the 8500 was better. It seemed to have a sharper picture. The software package from ATI is great and for recording TV or transferring from your VCR or your Camcorder the All-in-Wonder products can't be beat for the price. Highly recommended by me. Thats my 2 cents.

[Bob The Great]

Lauroy8, your probably experinceing the soap effect. It cleans the image up a bit but it probably won't be as sharp.

I have the 8500DV AIW (AIW owners unite!!), and it rules! I gets awesome FPS in just about everything (Doom3 even ran playably most of the time). Its TV features are really good but not great. I'd really like a cleaner image. I've heard the 8500 AIW has a better tuner card then the 8500DV. I love the TV features though. I mean while your surfing the web you can have a semi transparent TV window somewhere on your desktop so you can watch tv as well! Its awesome!

Installing the drivers can be a pain, as if you don't get the right the first time you gotta unistall it all and go back to VGA mode then reinstall everything.

Overall though it added a completly new area to my PC. I mean it turned it into something more! I could do everything with it! Its awesome. The rest of the world is just catching on with things like XP Media Edition etc... Still ATI peoples have been enjoying TV on there desktops for years.

Also about recording. It does take a lot of room for high quality but you can lower the quality. Whats really nice though is just pausing the show. The quality stays nice and you can fastworard or rewind then. I love that feature, I can eat dinner then get right back to the show where I left off!

[whatmeworry]

My Radeon AIW (usually shows as a 7200) OCs nicely and runs most games well, but not at the highest possible resoutions. No need to blow $300 to $400 for latest versions when the tuners in the older ones are just as good.

[lauroy8]

I totally agree, if you don't need a high powered gaming card and just need the TV tuner capabilities then you should think about getting an older All-In-Wonder card. I still have an AIW Rage 128 pro in an older computer and it looks and works great for video capture.

[WingWizard]

Yeah, but I need a high powered gaming card....Doom 3 and HL2