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ATI AIW RADEON 9600XT Video Card


Texsox
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The EasyShare software basically turns your All-in-Wonder computer into a multimedia server for your home network. If other computers on a home network have Radeon cards they can get live TV and archived multimedia feeds from the All0in-Wonder/EasyShare computer.

 

Here's more info:

http://www.ati.com/products/multimediacenter/eazyshare.html

 

Of coursse, my druthers would be to stop screwing around with the cheap iron and get a dual 2.5 G5 mac (:D ), but I'll concede that 80% of the game market is aimed at the cheap iron so you're probably locked into it. I don't like the lack of DVI support on this card for all the other bells and whistles it has (especially with so many homes going HD and plasma, etc.), and I'd like it to be able to drive two monitors and TV-out simultaneously. But it's got a lot of neat features, puts out a deinterlaced TV signal, TV and FM tuners, some nice shaders and renderers and light effects processing...

 

If you're not hung up about the main monitor outputs still being creaky old VGA technology I think it's a good choice.

 

Note: Since you're building this from the ground up it's probbably not an issue, but none of the Multimedia Center software (including EasyShare) is supposed to work very well (if at all) with anything less than a Pentium 4.

Edited by FlaSoxxJim
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I have the 256mb video card for one of my pc's so I can do video work for the web. That thing kicks ass. Sounds like a jet engine starting when you turn it on. hehe.

 

For gaming, what you are getting is plenty solid. ATI makes some pretty good stuff.

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All-in-Wonders are great if that is what you are looking for. The main feature is the video in which lets you use your computer like a TV basically. Just make sure this is what your son wants. Otherwise I would recommend a 9800 Pro which costs about the same but is faster than the 9600 and doesn't have the video in plugs.

 

EasyShare sounds really cool too although I've never tried it. Basically you can use the computer to decode TV signals and then send them to any other computer on the network and watch them as streaming video. This probably takes up considerable amounts of your home network bandwidth though.

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Currently the system has an AMD Athlon 2700+, 1 gig of ram, a SoundBlaster card, DVD burner, CD Burner, old fashioned floppy drive :D (I wanted to add a 5 1/4 for laughs) The video card will be the final step for a few days, maybe even months. One thing I thought of is he does not have cable TV in his room. To take full advantage of this card, he would need a direct cable feed, not from the network.

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Ah I remember using those 5 1/4 drives in like first/second grade. The computer monitors were green text on a black background, everything was "Chicago" font. The disks had horribly blurry clip art that went in the stories we wrote (printed on dot matrix printers, of course).

 

The good ol' days.

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