Sapphire Radeon 9000 Pro AIW - The Beast

In the antient times of Rage Pro chips it introduced a unique card that was not so good for gaming, but the perfect choice for multimedia users.

Having a TV out and TV in and a TV tuner was a breakthrough for those almost Jurassic days and that was one of the things that put ATI on the map.

All in Wonder is a great concept for a card but until its most recent generation it was lacking in 3D performance because of the extreme complexity of the card.

Traditionally PAL version that is used in Europe always lags behind the NTSC, American version of the card due to the slightly different design and certification process. ATI made an offer to all its partners to go for All in Wonder cards in Europe after a year exclusive deal with Hercules and Sapphire was one of the first companies that responded to that offer, and to sell these cards into the European market.

The Card
Sapphire chose rather interesting name for this generation of cards and called them "The Beast". The Beast in question is maybe a kraken, a giant squid, or a very agitated octopus, I think.

The card is based on a pure ATI reference design, has a red PCB and BGA memory and it's clocked at the standard frequency of 275MHz. The Card uses Infineon BGA memory with 3.6ns access time, working at 540 MHz, so just below the maximum limit of 555 MHz. You will find a onboard Stereo TV tuner capable of showing standard 125 channals and ATI has made very easy to make it work driver - you can easily chose which country you live in and whether you are using cable or terrestrial TV.

Even Bosnia is included on the list so the guys did a great job. The card is equipped with both TV In and TV out features and you can choose whether you want to use cable with S Video out or violet colored TV out and there's even a guide to where the inputs and outputs are so you don't break your neck trying to plug things in.

Software
Sapphire offers the Red Line utility for its cards that lets you perform all kind of tweaks for all Radeon based cards. The only thing that we disliked was the interface of this program, which definitely needs some work.

It comes with Pinnacle studio 8.4 for editing or capturing videos, and after just a few seconds working with it I could make my own small movies. This rather interesting program will come in handy for all non professionals. It's easy to use and can help you create nice cuts in your video files and make some custom movies for your family.

The card ships with standard Catalyst driver versions 2.4 and it's really easy to install all the drivers since all you need to do is to insert a CD and start the process. Since there are more than one program and drivers on that CD, you will need to click a couple of times and after a reboot you are ready to rock and roll.

When you start the TV application for the first time, you will be asked to chose the region and your TV type, and then the program starts scanning for channels.

From a gamer's perspective, you have a fully capable DirectX 8.1 card with support for Pixel and Vertex shaders below 2.0 - the unique feature of the DX 9 card and it's good enough to play most of the games available now.

You will be able to use FSAA and Anisotrophic fitering with this card but you must be aware that this will affect your gaming performance. After having some problems in Quake 3 and Aquanox with the current driversm we downloaded and installed latest Catalyst 3.0a drivers and WDM drivers for DirectX 9 and installed them, curing the problems.

We are not sure whether Sapphire will listen to us and ship the cards with Catalyst 3.0 but if not, when you buy it download them from ATI's web site and all your troubles should evaporate.

The software pack that comes on the ATI driver CD is a pure USA/Canada based driver with PAL support and some of the features such as Guide + will not work in Europe. The card comes with ATI DVD bundled in the pack and the current version of the ATI multimedia center is 7.9.

Test
We used the following hardware:

AMD Athlon 2700+ 2.16 GHz clocked FSB 333 CPU (13 x 166)
2 x Corsair PC3500 XMS DDR 433 modules
Akasa Silver Mountain 2 cooler - slient version
Abit Nforce 2 NF7- S motherboard
Mator 80 GB 7200 drive 9
Aopen CD-RW 40x12x48
Targa Visionary 19 inch Display

We used out standard applications for benchmarking Quake 3, 3Dmark 2001SE, Aquamark, Serious Sam SE and Unreal tournament 2003 demo.

We will add this part later on since we are on the road and dont have our "secret book with results" but we experienced decent performance from this card, very similar to the Radeon 9000 PRO. You can play every game available at reasonable performance but we will update this article with our usual comparition tables when we get back into our lab.

Capture Apart from the 3D performance test, we tried to capture some videos from TV channel to see what this card is capable of. We used the highest possible resolution 720x576 - which is a full DVD quality with 48000 encoding and we recorded about two minutes of video without any single drop out. You can use different codecs and all we tried didn't lose any frames.

We can remember a time just a few years back when you could only dream of capture video without frame drops at these resolutions, but the CPU and graphics industry has come a long way since then.

Conclusion
Since this card costs £139 including VAT and has a stack of features, we can easily recommend it to anyone that needs a TV tuner and wants to play with video editing features. This is obviously not a gamer's first choice, but you will be able to decently run all games that are currently around as this is a DirectX 8.1 compatible card.

We surely miss RF remote that will be available with Sapphire AIW 9700 PRO as we learned. We hope that Sapphire will ofer this remote as an option since with it this card would be a complete solution.

The card should be in the shops any day now as Sapphire is ready to ship quantities. Sapphire and ATI did a great job with this card and for its purpose, it's highly recommended. µ