ATi All In Wonder Radeon 9600 XT

One of the more interesting and useful accessories to ship with the All-In-Wonder 9600 XT is the Remote Wonder II.  The original Remote Wonder, which was impressive in its own right, shipped with some previous ATi AIW cards.  It gave users the ability to control their All-In-Wonder equipped systems from across the room, or even another room in their house because it used radio frequencies as opposed to infrared to communicate with the receiver that's attached to the PC.  The Remote Wonder II offers all of this same functionality, and then some...

Remote Wonder II No Need To Be Near Your PC!

The Remote Wonder II has all of the same features as the original Remote Wonder, but virutally every aspect of it has been improved or revised in some way.  The RW II has an updated layout with more customizable buttons (10), its range has been upped to 60 feet and the mouse control knob is much more sesitive.  It takes a bit of getting used to, but after working with the Remote Wonder II for a few minutes, we were very comfortable using it to perform some basic tasks on the system, like launching / closing applications or stepping through songs in WinAMP.

Configuring the Remote Wonder II is very simple, thanks to ATi's easy to use software.  Assigning functions to each of the remote's customizable buttons is as easy as selecing an item from a drop-down menu, and loading plug-ins for some popular application is simple as well.  ATi ships the Remote Wonder II preconfigured to work with their Multimedia Center software and includes plug-ins for Guide+, PowerPoint and WinAMP, but a slew of other plug-ins are available from multiple sites as well.  Take a look at this site for a list of popular plug-ins, and you can always consult the oracle to look for more.

There was one aspect of the Remote Wonder II that we feel could use a bit of improvement when the next version ships, however.  We found the buttons below the numberic keypad to be a tad small and think they're too a bit too close together.  The buttons at the top of the remote are somewhat larger, and the numberic keypad is spread out nicely, but the buttons at the bottom are much tougher to distinguish if you're not looking at the remote, and are "touch typing" so to speak.  Then again, maybe I just have fat fingers! :)

The HotHardware Test System Intel Powered Screamer

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:  We tested the ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon 9600 XT on an i875P based MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.2CGHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults". Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz in dual-channel mode, with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by the SPD, and then we set the AGP aperture size to 256MB. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP1 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers and hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the available updates. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, System Restore and Drive Indexing were then disabled, the hard drive was de-fragmented and a 768MB permanent page file was created. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests.