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ATi Brings Back A Winner

by marc klink

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.

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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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Posted in General on June 27th, 2008

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With the new and intermediate home theatrician in mind, Talking Home Theaters takes you on a tour of what's hot, what's affordable and what's not. If you've ever been envious of the endless home entertainment options available or are looking to build your first home theater without eliminating your children's education funds, you've come to the right place. We focus on scouring the internet for excellent entry-level ideas, incredible deals for newbies and home theater tips and tricks, so you don't have to.

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