ATI All In Wonder RADEON 8500 DV

Hardware - The Card In Detail

The first thing that catches your eye is the silicon TV tuner (1). Below that, ATI has placed the Rage Theater Chip (2), which is responsible for the the video inputs. Under the R8500 GPU (6) is a special ATI AGP to PCI Bridge (3), which communicates with the FireWire chips FW323-05 from Agere (4). The floppy voltage connector (5) is designed only for FireWire devices that require power supplied via the bus and can by no means be compared to the voltage source for AGP! According to ATI, the voltage is only available at the slot bracket. Other interfaces include the cable connection (8), VGA/DVI (9), and the antenna connection.

The entire 64 MB of memory has been placed on the back of the card and is made up of four Samsung chips with 5 ns each (1). A component from Micronas (2) is responsible for stereo sound functionality of the tuner signal.

The external input/ output block offers both video-in and video-out on each side of the case. In addition, there is a second FireWire port, as well as an S/PDIF digital-out.