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Review: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro All-In-Wonder

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 1 August 2003, 00:00 5.0

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qas2

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Software Setup I


It's prudent to setup MMC first, since that configures everything else bar the RemoteWonder. To get at the MMC options, it's quickest to use the launcher sidebar.



Use the little tickbox to bring up the options.



The DVD and TV options tabs are uninteresting. The DVD tab lets you set audio options related to downmixing the Dolby output to stereo for use with regular speakers, and also whether or not to enable multi monitor support for doing hardware DVD overlay on any extra head. The TV tab simply lets you set your capture device. Unless you have another capture card in your system, the only option will be "ATI All-In-Wonder".

The EASYLOOK tab shown is the most interesting of the initial configuration options you hit. EASYLOOK is simply a good looking set of hardware generated overlays that you use to control the video output, be it TV, DVD or something like a DivX file. If you've ever seen a copy of Windows XP Media Center Edition in action, you'll have seen the cool overlays you get while operating the MCE software, that lets you control it. I'll show off EASYLOOK later on, but you'll want to turn it on at all times. I hit a rather interesting snag with it, but I'll discuss later.

Before we move on, I'll just say that 99% of the shipped skins for the players and interfaces in MMC are dreadful. Ugly is the word I'm looking for, without using expletives. EASYLOOK takes the pain away, since that's the interface you'll see for the All-In-Wonder most of the time, but when doing TV on the desktop or anything like that, the skins are bad. Brushed metal is bad, to my eyes anyway, and where's the default option to theme the windows using the current Windows widgets? An oversight to be rectified in the next release of MMC I hope.



That's the default TV control skin. Agree with me? I think that's ugly anyway, and none of the others shipped with MMC are any better. And no, my Windows theme isn't brushed metal, it's a vertical shade. One more tip, since the skin for the sidebar launcher is awful, set it to something less rank, and auto hide the bar by right clicking on it. Of course, it's all personal preference, you may like them.