All In Wonder Radeon 8500

[Bing Fung]

The new All In Wonder Radeon 8500 has been announced, From the specifications it looks to be an awesome card.

Key Features are:

-RF remote control
-Component out (dongle)
-DVI out
-Dual monitor support (Rick S, this has your name on it )
-2 Firewire ports
-Stereo TV Tuner
-Interactive Program Guide
-TV Time Shifting

Nvidia announced their Personnel Cinema chip and ATI has responded accordingly with what sounds to be the next rage for HTPC's

Read more about the AIW 8500 here




Bing

[SiliGoose]

ATI and nVidia are in quite a heated war right now. On both the PC and console front.

The AIW Radeon also has a really cool RF remote control. Now you don't need line of sight between you and your HTPC!




-Sili

[JonMarsh]

Yes, Bing,

It will be very interesting to see how the new Radeon products turn out- whether there are any enhancements to the visual quality, and of course a component output dongle would be a godsend for a lot of people.

There's been a lot of beta testing going on for the new ATI DVD player and media center, so I have hopes that that will be even better, primarily in terms of adjustments and operation for some of the less standard mode, and overlay settings such as gamma, which can be a real pain to get set right now; hence, a number of registry patches floating around the web to get it "set" right.

IMO, the current Radeon boards and the ATI 4.1 player do have the best picture for an HTPC solution. What I've read to date doesn't sound like the GeForce 3 has upgraded it's DVD capabilities; unlike previous nVidia board launces, they haven't been talking as much about HDTV or advanced video capabilities. Whether it's the 10 bit DAC's in the Radeon, differences in intermediate processing bit depth, or whatever, it works. The only thing I've seen that I like better than a properly setup Radeon plus ATI 4.1 player is the Ayre D1 DVD player- razor sharp for a set top, but amazingly quiet and artifact free- heroic measures for supply regulation, ground isolation, a digital interpolation filter, and 14 bit high speed DACs with zero feedback 3 pole bessel filters following all contribute. If you want to see how good DVD *CAN* be, view one of those on a CRT rig. I had a demo by the designer while I was in Colorado on my vacation; he's an old friend of mine.

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Bing Fung]

Is the Ayre an expensive player Jon?

ATI does make a good module for sure, still, isn't the Matrox G400/450/550's considered the standard for image quality?




Bing