A very nice card indeed!
The TV & FM Radio are nicely integrated together. When you have the TV running & want to load the FM Radio the TV automatically suspends. When you are done listening to the radio, the TV re-loads.
This saves a lot of messing around with having to manually mute either the TV or radio when using separate TV & radio cards.
I read several reviews on the 9600 & there is a general consensus that the FM tuner has a high S/N ratio (meaning it is very quite) due to the metal shielding around it.
The radio can also record plus there is a scheduler to automatically turn on the radio & record any selected station at any time. There is also the usual Sleep timer.
There is also a TVIO like function where you can repeat, & go back to previous times.
I understand that the radio will also work with MC as it is built into the Philips TV tuner as part of the TV (little silver box on the ATI card). The trick is to treat the radio as TV channels (or something like that).
The 9600 Pro also supports TWO monitors running at the same time (using Hydravision). There are two video monitor jacks. Information can be drug from one monitor to the other with the mouse. All this is done with Multi-View (a new feature).
It also supports PiP (Picture-In-Picture) as while as POP (Picture-Outside-Picture). For this to work you need to also purchase a separate ATI TV Wonder ($65 for the TV Wonder Pro at Amazon.com). I just ordered mine from Amazon. Using Hydravision & Multi-View (ATI's dual monitor software) you can drag one TV station to the second monitor if you like. Clicking on either TV image will bring that one to the front & the sound will then be for that station.
I will let you know how it all works later on after I get the TV Wonder installed & working.
TV Image quality with MC10 is outstanding. I really like the new Sharpness control (Ctrl+Shift+Tab).
The 9600 Pro can use 1 or 2 soundcards.
In the box is a coupon for a free upgrade to ATI's brand new Remote Wonder II. The RWII has many new features that make it much more universal plus TWICE the range of the RWI... 60 feet!
You also get a bunch of free games (full versions) including Half-Life 2.
The board is fully DirectX 9 compatible so all the newest graphics will run on it.
You can now burn DVD's from Multimedia Center.
Now supports MPEG-4.
According to ATI the 9600 Pro is almost as fast as the A-I-W 9700.
The 9600 Pro seems to be one hot card with a hot price... about $240 US at Amazon.com.
ATI has made this the card to beat for a combination of performance, feature set, & price.
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Topic: OT... First impressions of the brand new ATI 9600 Pro video card... (Read 758 times)