The ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 Review
Not Just a TV Card

By, Jeff Bouton
April 4, 2002

Software Included With The ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 Looking Good...

Multimedia Center:

The core software package of the ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 is the "ATi Multimedia Center."  The multimedia center gives the user full control over all of the unit's advanced features.  Whether we viewed the TV, a DVD, or listened to a CD, the multimedia center accommodated us nicely.  The interface is clean, easy to follow and very similar for each component.  A customizable taskbar loads when the system starts, giving easy access to all of the software in the package.  To be honest, there are so many options with the ATi Multimedia Center software, we could probably write a review just on the software alone!  But we'll touch on a few key features to give you an idea of what to expect. 

One of our favorite features is TV on-demand which allows the card to act much like a TIVO device, pausing live television and resuming where you left off.  Depending on your hard drive capacity, a program can be paused for a few minutes, or up to several hours, as long as you have the space to cache the program.  One of the more useful software items is the GuidePlus+ software package.  Simply connect to the internet, drop in your ZIP-code and a weeks worth of programming is downloaded to your PC.  The best feature here, is that you can click on each channel and a preview of the program can be seen in the upper left-hand corner of your screen.  Once you find the show that you like, just double click it and the TV software loads.  The All-In-Wonder also acts like a digital VCR allowing recording of Television or other external input devices using the ATi adapter.  The card can capture in ATI's default VCR format as well as AVI, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.  Within each of the format settings, is a plethora of adjustments to help tweak the quality and size of the video to your liking.  My only wish is that there be more documentation available to help the user figure out what some of the settings are.  The User's Guide barely touches on these settings, leaving us to fend for ourselves with hours of experimentation.  Fortunately there are a multitude of websites on the net that offer a better understanding of the inner workings of digital video.  Depending on what your video goals are, there is a strong chance there is a website out there that can get you on the right track.

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Another useful piece of software is the Library.  The Library allows for quick and simple cataloging of multimedia files on your PC.  Once it completely scans the drives of your choice, a list is compiled showing detailed information of each multimedia file found on the system.  This gives a simple to use central location that allows you to easily access and organize you files.  Above is a screenshot of the software (Don't worry Lars, those Metallica MP3s are bought and paid for!)

General Comments on the Software and TV Functions:

Once we got the card installed, we couldn't wait to start tinkering with all of it's features.  The TV picture quality of the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 is exceptional to say the least.  At full screen, the picture quality was much better than it was on my TV.  The TV On-Demand worked well, although the picture does degrade slightly.  The overall functionality of the ATI Multimedia Center software was good, but we did encounter times when the File Viewer would randomly close while fast forwarding through a video file.  To be sure it wasn't our installation, we reinstalled the card to a separate test system and the errors still occurred.  Aside from that, the software functioned well.  The Remote control feature is simply fantastic.  We were able to load a show that we wanted on the PC and control every function from a another room without any problems.  We were impressed with the responsiveness of the Remote and software, instantly reacting to the press of a button.  The center dial of the remote gives the user mouse control so there is no need to get up to change settings or programs. 

Overclocking the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 Get On The Bus!

When it came to overclocking the All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500, the results weren't too bad.  To start, we loaded the latest available version of Powerstrip and accessed the advanced performance features.  Starting out with the default 260MHz. GPU and the 180MHz. RAM, we started inching the settings higher.  With the GPU, we were able to reach 287MHz., a 10% gain.  The RAM gains were even higher, pushing the memory up over 22% to 220MHz.  Later on we'll take a look and see what kind of performance gains we can expect to see with these increases, as well as noting which would have more of an impact.

On a side note, if you are planning on overclocking your system bus while running the All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500, you should consider the following.  While overclocking our test system, we found that the video card was quite sensitive, failing after the system bus reached the 140-142MHz. range.  We are relatively sure that if it were a simple video card, we could have gone much higher without incident, but considering the addition of sensitive TV components, the tolerances decrease tremendously.  If your motherboard has the ability to adjust the PCI divider, we suspect that you could push the bus fairly high by reducing the divider setting.  However without that adjustment, I wouldn't recommend overclocking your FSB too high, the card probably won't be able to handle it.

With that said, let's move on and start running some benchmarks and see how this card performs shall we?
 

HotHardware Test Systems AthlonXP All the Way!!

 

Benchmarking With 3DMark2001SE and Serious Sam SE The DirectX Approach.

To start off our benchmarking tests, we ran MadOnion's 3DMark2001SE to test the cards DirectX capabilities.  As a comparison, we ran the card at both default and overclocked speeds as well as throwing in a few GeForce3 Ti500 and GeForce4 MX440 numbers for good measure.  In the first test we set the resolution for 800x600x32.

As a whole, the ATIi All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 performed quite well at both stock and overclocked speeds.  Once overclocked though, the score increase a bit higher than 5.5%, much less than the actual increase in the GPU and Memory speeds themselves.  Next we set the resolution to 1024x768x32 and see how the card reacts to the increased load.

Now this turned out to be a little interesting.  With the increase in resolution, we saw a wider increase from the default clock speed and the overclocked settings.  At 1024x768x32, the cards performance increased 8.8% while overclocked, narrowing the lead of the GeForce4 MX440.

Next we'll run Serious Sam SE with DirectX settings and see how the card compares to the GeForce4 MX440.

Serious Sam SE:

One of the best qualities of the Serious Sam SE benchmark is its ability to test both DirtectX and OpenGL.  We'll start off with the DirectX settings and see how the All-In-Wonder performed in comparison to the GeForce4 MX440.

With Serious Sam SE, the scores were much closer than with 3DMark2001SE.  Although the GeForce4 MX440 maintained the lead, the Radeon was not far behind.

Next we'll kick in the OpenGL tests!

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