ATi Brings Back A Winner
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For the last couple of years, there has been a huge hole in the video card market. It was 2006 when the last ATi All-in-Wonder was produced, and nVidia had discontinued their similar offering before that. With the huge increase of Home Theater PCs being built these days the removal of this type of product was all wrong.
Now ATi has announced the latest in the All-in-Wonder series, combining an HD3650 video card with the TV Wonder tuner card, for a list price of $199.
While not the fastest GPU around, the 3650 will do a very good job of taking care of the HTPC and media center market segment, while the choice for the gamer who also watches movies would be a 4xxx series card and a separate TV Wonder card. For those who are using a small form factor box to build the HTPC, this will be a beautiful thing, because the heat output of the 3650 GPU will be much easier to mitigate.
The PCI Express 2.0-based All-in-Wonder HD card, includes unified decoder technology for hardware-accelerated Blu-ray playback, and records and captures both HDTV and analog signals using ATI Theater 650 Pro hardware MPEG-2 encoding. Dual DVI connectors are included, and HDMI support has also been added. HDCP support, however, has apparently not been included.
AMD’s Catalyst Media Center provides a front end to scheduling recordings, while a second bundled AMD LIVE! “Entertainment Suite CD” allows a user to access the DVR capabilities over the Internet with a broadband connection.
In the announcement from ATi, the door was left open when the question of faster GPUs paired with the TV Wonder. It may happen, and that would bring the raw speed of GDDR5 memory to the HTPC system, making it much easier to do those things that stretch the abilities of lesser GPU/CPU combinations. It will also make small form PVRs easier to build, as the combo card will free up an additional, much needed slot for an additional tuner.
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Technorati Tags: ATi - All-in-Wonder - PVR - HTPC - AMD Live!
3 Comments
George
June 27th, 2008
at 2:25pm
in my opinion, this card would be perfect for a home theater pc, however, as a gamer, I would not buy it
E2001
June 29th, 2008
at 8:28am
The biggest reason you can’t buy a good combo card is piracy. For years, the movie & TV industries have been all over the makers of ALL types of recording technologies to cheapen, disable, or discontinue altogether, any device which aids in the duplication of copyrighted materials. As a result; the tv/capture boards from 8 years ago work better than anything you can buy today. You may have HD capability on the latest cards; but you’ll need a government permit if you want to use it for anything more than watching youtube videos.
the oracle
June 29th, 2008
at 11:40am
E2001, you bring up a good point. Many see the HDMI connection as a panacea for those that don’t wish to be bothered with cable hook up.
I see it as another method of content lockdown - the very fact that certain content is not visible on a monitor if the correct connection is not used galls me.
I think that younger people think that it doesn’t matter, as they either don’t care about the content, or they believe that they will be able to find a way to crack the mechanism - I simply think we should not have to try.