Date: May 10th, 2004
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: ATI Technologies
<---Shop for the ATI ALL IN WONDER RADEON 9600XT VIDEOCARD Here

PRODUCT VALUE FOR THE MONEY

Now a lot of people are saying that laying down US$299 bucks for a videocard is a little tough. But, when you add everything that comes with the package, it's actually quite a steal.

Take these prices for example (USD):

Remote Wonder II: $49
Pinnacle Studio SE: $99
Matchware Mediator 7: $399
GemStar's GuidePlus+: $249 Lifetime Subscription (which is included with this card)
Muvee AutoProducer DVD Edition: $49.95

Add those up: ~US$845.95 + the actual value of the videocard!

Now you see, for US$299 , you get US$850 worth of value and that is not even taking in the videocard into the equation!


These All in Wonder Cards bring hands down the best bang for the buck on the market.

PRODUCT CLOSE-UP

So what does the latest All-in-Wonder incarnation look like? Here comes some eye candy.

For the AIW 9600XT ATI decided to use an upgraded VPU heatsink to compensate for the 25Mhz core frequency stock overclock over the standard 9600XT videocard.

Although at first glance I was hoping that it would also cover the memory modules, but after closer inspection I found that it is indeed only for the core itself.

The underside of the card is standard with no heatsinks on any of the memory modules. I myself am a fan of memory heatsinks seeing it will help dissipate any extra heat caused by an overclock. If you are planning on overclocking this card, maybe check into some ramsinks to keep everything cool.

Even though there was no extra memory cooling, I was still able to squeeze out a good overclock and the results of that overclock will be shown in the benchmarking.

The ram now shipping with this card is the 2.8ns Samsung variety which is theoretically rated at a maximum of 350Mhz. I was successful at pushing this particular ram past that threshold and just slightly beyond which I will explain in the overclocking section.