Web page: www.ati.com
Price: $250 lowest price
As we bask in the power of gigahertz processors and gigatexel-capable video cards, it is easy to forget that a few short years ago we could only dream of such technology. Slowly but surely, the increasing clout of the PC has drawn the once-passive world of home-entertainment nearer and nearer to the interactive domain of personal computing.
There used to be a time when video cards were 2D-only. In order to obtain 3D rendering capabilities, you would have to buy an add-on card. PC-DVD was introduced some time after, and in order to decode the MPEG-2 stream required another upgrade. The ability to watch TV on your PC started to become popular around the same time. Unfortunately, the tuner would occupy a third expansion board. At that point, you had already spent nearly a grand on upgrades and cluttered your case beyond belief.
Fast-forward to today's brutal graphics market. Several manufacturers have released all-encompassing solutions that offer more integrated features than one person could ever hope to use. None have seen quite as much success as ATI's All In Wonder line. Their fifth generation solution, the All-In-Wonder RADEON, features the RADEON GPU, 32MB of DDR memory, and a host of capabilities to make this the most potent poison ATI has ever concocted.