ATI's Best: All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 128MB & TV/Capture Card Roundup

Unfortunately even Guide+ isn't perfect as there are no provisions for setting guaranteed show recordings. If you want to record West Wing regardless of what else you have scheduled to record there's no way of specifying it and there's no way to prioritize recordings. The lack of conflict resolution features is omnipresent in the PC VR market and even ATI isn't impervious to its negative effects. Another issue with Guide+ is the fact that you must manually update your show listings, although it will automatically update all favorites once you've downloaded the new listings. Gemstar could have just as easily introduced an auto-update mechanism where listings are automatically downloaded whenever an Internet connection is detected, or every specified amount of time. The reason this is so important is because you can only download 7 days of channel listings at a time which is shorter than the 2 weeks that most set top PVRs offer.

The Guide+ screen does let you continue watching TV while you're browsing through your listings but as soon as you click on another listing it will switch channels. What would be even more useful is if you were allowed to disable the TV window in guide plus and run the normal ATI TV application while using Guide+, the transparency setting would even work very well here but alas it's wishful thinking on our part. ATI has quite a bit of time between now and the release of their next AIW card, maybe we'll see some of these improvements suggested to Gemstar?

As we mentioned before, not being able to navigate through Guide+ using the remote is an unfortunate oversight (other than using the directional pad/mouse buttons). We would like to see the ability to easily scroll through listings and at the touch of a button add items to our watch, record or favorite lists.

Another complaint that carried over from our Personal Cinema tests was the lack of a silent recording mode. If the AIW is set to record every episode of the X-Files and the TV application is closed (yet ATI's scheduler is running in the background), the TV application will pop up over whatever happens to be in the foreground and begin recording as soon as the next showing of the X-Files comes on. So if you're working on a paper or even just browsing the web you'll get a rude awakening. A silent recording mode wouldn't be difficult to implement in software and would make for a great option. Being able to let the application load minimized to the systray without a splash screen and only indicate that it's recording using a red dot would be much appreciated in our opinion.

The final piece of software to talk about in ATI's extensive bundle is their File Library which is simply a location where all of your captured media is referenced automatically. You can even have it search for all media types on your hard drive to catalog them as well. It's just a useful way of managing your files, a small thing but if you haven't noticed it's often the little things that matter the most.

If you can't tell by the multiple pages we've spent on the AIW Radeon 8500DV and the fact that we said we'd save the best for last, ATI has done a wonderful job with their AIW line and we'd go as far as saying that ATI's best graphics product is their All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500DV.