To test the ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro, we installed the card in an Intel D875PBZ motherboard with AGP 8X support, a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 chip and 512MB DDR RAM. The card also has a plethora of PC-TV applications and top-notch 3D gaming performance, but for this review, we’ll focus on those features that are most interesting to video editors. This includes high-quality MPEG-2 capture a breakout box with S-video, composite and stereo audio inputs DVI, VGA, composite, S-video and component video output hardware-assisted MPEG-2 rendering workstation-quality OpenGL graphics performance and bundled Pinnacle Studio 8.4 video editing software. This card, though expensive, offers a variety of functions that should cause home video editors to sit up and take notice. Case in point: the ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro, one of the most highly rated, award-winning video display adapters ever to hit the PC marketplace.

Fortunately, the manufacturers of computer hardware have become aware of this situation and have begun to offer solutions that allow video editing, gaming and other applications to co-exist in harmony on the same computer. Hobbyist video editors usually find themselves tweaking the home computer, adding a FireWire card and a big hard drive and then valiantly attempting to fight off the gamers in the household. Unfortunately, not everyone has the finances to purchase a separate computer just for editing video. Why? Primarily because other types of hardware and applications (3D video adapters and games, for instance) might conflict with your finely-tuned video editing machine, creating headaches that you can avoid by dedicating a computer solely to video editing purposes. Often, you’ll hear video editors (including many who write for this magazine) suggest that it’s best to create a video editing computer from the ground up and design a system that’s dedicated to video editing.

Ati all in wonder pro