The past two years or so has been good for the Home Theater PC market. Never before have we come so close to total convergence of the PC and Home Theater setups. Back in 1996 or so when convergence was attempted by various PC manufacturers such as Phillips, Gateway, and Compaq, their attempts weren?t too successful. The problem back then was the high costs of the systems. Gateway?s Destination XTV was one of the popular models that came with either 27? or 32? CRT television and carried a price in the $2000 range while Phillips had their high end Marantz Preamp coupled with a computer called the DVX8000. The thing was the systems were nothing more then expensive DVD players that allowed you to surf the internet on your TV.

Sure the Philips DVX8000 had a TV Tuner that integrated a deinterlacer but the deinterlacer was only useful when used with a computer monitor. The Philips was also one of the first Progressive Scan DVD players, but once again you could only achieve progressive scan using VGA output, which was limited to monitors and projectors at the time. Philips marketed the DVX8000 as a high end piece of audio equipment that also came with a hefty price tag of $3000. Gateway?s Destination was a bit cheaper and included a TV, which better suited users. The thing with these early HTPCs was their tasks were relatively simple. All they allowed the user to do is surf the internet on a TV, view DVD?s in progressive scan, and be the center of a Home Theater system.

These systems however were ahead of their time. The concept was right but the market simply wasn?t ready for such a thing. After a lack of market acceptance Philips, Gateway, and Compaq discontinued their systems. For a few years, the concept of an HTPC had lain dormant, only to be awaken by the dawn of Personal Video Recorders or PVR for short. Nowadays VCR?s are simply ancient technology that no one cares for anymore. The latest and greatest recording media is a hard drive. Dish Network started the trend when they teamed up with MSN to produce the Dish Player 7100 receiver that allowed users to use WebTV, Pause, and Record movies onto a small 8GB hard drive. Other solutions from TiVo, Direct TV, and Replay TV came shortly afterwards.

Sometime afterwards came software that allowed you to perform the same tasks as a TiVo but using your existing computer. The main requirement for building your own HTPC or TiVo like device is a TV Tuner or some kind of Video Input device. There are three practical ways to get Video input into your PC. The first method is to use a standalone PCI TV Tuner card that will saturate your PCI bus. Beyond that you could also obtain an external USB TV Tuner that will saturate your CPU cycles. The most popular and simplest method is to use a video card that has an integrated TV Tuner.

Since TV tuners that are integrated with a GPU utilize the AGP bus, the PCI bus is left unsaturated which means you have more bandwidth for that bandwidth sucking Creative Labs card. ATI fathered the concept of integrating a graphics card and TV tuner into a single board solution with their All in Wonder line of graphics cards. At one point in time the All in Wonder line was a premium product that carried a high price.

Nowadays ATI offers an AIW for every price point. At the bottom end of the spectrum is the AIW9200 with a MSRP of $149. At the mid-range is the AIW9600 with an MSRP of $199 and replaces the existing AIW9000. For upper mid-range at the $299 MSRP price point is the All in Wonder 9600XT. For the very high end user that wants a TV tuner is the AIW9800 Pro.

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• ATI 9600XT (0 of 4)
• Remote Wonder, Installation (0 of 4)
• Test Setup (0 of 4)
• Test Results, Conclusion (0 of 4)