This is a brilliant card. I'll start with whats in the box:
The Card The All in Wonder Remote The All in Wonder USB reciever The All in Wonder breakout box ( for connecting to tv, camcorders etc) Drivers Batteries for the remote S-Video lead Quick start guide
The card is a Built By ATi, built on a red board. This version from Hercules comes with Samsung RAM, the same as on the pro version, and runs at the same clock speeds as the pro. This is very high quality stuff, and other manufacturers boards come with lower quality RAM on board. This version of the 9800SE also has the 256bit memory bus, this is quite comlicated to explain, but basically it is twice as fast as the 128bit found on other brands. The only difference between the Pro and the SE is that the Pro has 8 render pipelines, the SE has four disabled so it only uses the other 4. The render pipelines are engines within the chip to create the display image, the more the better.
Once installed with all the included software, which pretty much installs itself (if you are coming from nVidia you may need to run drivercleaner first) you have a card that will perform about the same as a 9600Pro but with better image quality, a TV tuner that can record, pause and rewind TV, a DVD player and media centre for playingay media files, all controlled from a remote control. You now have a full media pc. For all the functions to work correctly you need TV arial connected, although it will work from analogue cable too.
The Remote can also control the mouse cursor, it has a large round control pad with left and right buttons next to it. The power button will first close an application, but can also shut down the pc. There are shortcut buttons along the top to start the TV, DVD, File player etc, and all the usual DVD/CD controls you would expect, including record, volume and channel. The remote works on radio frequency so the USB reciever can be hidden out of sight, mine works up to around 5m away.
The TV funtions perfectly, with teletext. It can be set to read subtitles from the news and take screen grabs, which are made into a HTML magazine for you to read, with all the main stories. This can be done with other prgrames but doesnt work as well.
One of the best things about this card is it s potential, the SE is from a batch of Pro cards with somne chips that have a faulty pipeline in them, but not all. The cards are basically Pro cards that have been told to use only four of the available eight engines. This slows the card down, as each engine has to do twice the work, but the quality is still the same as the top end cards out there. If you want, you can install 3rd party drivers that re-enable the extr a4 engines, giving you a very large speed boost. This only works in about two thirds of cases, but when it does you have a 9800 AIW Pro for half the money! Mine worked, and i can play anything with all details maxed out. Many of the cards are still labelled as the Pro version
The card has run perfectly, and i highly recommend it, Hercules are stopping prodution now so get one while you can!
More details
Ease of use
Easy
Instruction manual
Satisfactory
Memory / capacity
Good
Manufacturer Support
Good
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