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ATI is releasing this week the latest in its line of All-in-Wonder cards, adding a few more flip-up tools to its Swiss army knife of a graphics board.

New in the All-in Wonder Radeon 8500 are a variety of input and output connectivity options for video capturing, digital displays, and Tivo-esque capabilities.

The newest Wonder board also adds 128MB of DDR graphics memory, a Remote Wonder wireless remote control, and the latest Multimedia Center with a new user interface and features. The All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 carries a suggested retail price of $399.

Memory Jumps to 128MB

Powered by the Radeon 8500 GPU, this All-in-Wonder houses a core clock speed of 275 Mhz with 275-Mhz memory clock speed as well. Add to that 128MB of DDR memory, and it's an impressive gaming board--the non-All-in-Wonder version of the Radeon 8500 with only 64MB of video memory holds the number two spot in our Top 10 Graphics Boards chart.

But it's not the gaming performance that draws enthusiasts to the All-in-Wonder. The card offers a versatile range of input and output ports--including S-Video, composite, DVI, and cable TV. These let you connect the card to your DVD player, camcorder, or even your cable signal with all the niftiness that entails. ATI provides all the necessary cables, as well.

With ATI's TV-On-Demand and Digital VCR, you can record and pause live TV shows, archive them on a hard drive (you'll need a whopper of a drive), and even transfer them to optical media such as CD-Rs or DVD-Rs. The additional video memory helps with the quality of such recordings. ATI says seven hours of MPEG-1 quality or three hours of MPEG-2 quality video takes up 5GB of hard drive space.

"It's a little bit of a premium card," says Martin Reynolds, vice president and research fellow at Gartner Dataquest. "It's not going to be an enormous seller, but there will be demand for it."

New Remote and Look

The All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 incorporates ATI's newly announced Remote Wonder, a sizeable RF remote control that lets you command the card's capabilities from the next room. The remote also features full mouse control, so you can manipulate the Windows desktop while you're away from your desk.

Version 7.6 of ATI's Multimedia Center software includes an updated interface and new features such as Translucent DVD. Similar to its Translucent TV (also an included feature), Translucent DVD lets users adjust the alpha blending of the video image on the desktop to make it visible even while it's behind another open application. You can work in Word while watching Don't Say a Word, for example.

A likely competitor is Visiontek's Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600, based on NVidia's highest-quality chip. Visiontek's newest Xtasy runs the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 with 128MB of memory, a 650-MHz memory clock, a 300-MHz engine, and comes with only DVI-out and S-Video-in and -out.

Board Limitations

But even an All-in-Wonder can't have it all. The 8500 version doesn't offer the FireWire ports of its 8500DV sibling. And, unlike its little brother, the All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500, it doesn't support Windows 95/98--you need to run Windows 2000, Me, or XP.

But it does pack a lot more multimedia and entertainment capabilities into your PC than the average graphics board. This is an area Reynolds believes is expanding.

"ATI is on the very leading edge of the PC and multimedia revolution--giving you a chance to test it out in the family room," he says. "It's going to be interesting to watch. The PC's not going to move into the family room anytime soon."

But it may just start to have more of a say in what's going on out there.

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