HIS All-In-Wonder 9600 XT

The first part of the PCB that stands out is the analogue TV and radio tuner. It picks up its TV signal from a terrestrial aerial or cable/satellite box via UHF signals and can detect up to 125 stereo channels. There's a funky feature known as TV-On-Demand that is included in Multimedia Center which allows you to use the All-In-Wonder 9600 XT to record live television to your hard drive. There's a similar program that exists for the radio tuner, this is known as FM-On-Demand.

Once the tuner has received the signals, whether for TV or radio, it needs to be able to convert them in to a format that both the GPU and Sound Card will understand; this is where the Theater 200 chip comes in. It features two components, namely a video decoder and an audio processor. The video decoding unit has the ability to handle simultaneous analogue inputs at the same time as supporting a wide range of TV signalling standards. The audio processor allows can process sounds up to a 16-bit 96kHz output, and similarly to the video decoder, it has support for a large range of audio signals.

The All-In-Wonder 9600 XT has four connectors on its back plate. There's two co-axial connectors, for TV and radio signals, a rather interesting connector that we'll come back to in a short while and finally there's a Video-In port which looks similar to your standard TV-Out that you find on just about every graphics card in this day and age. Interestingly, there are no VGA or DVI ports...

In fact, there's no DVI support on the All-In-Wonder 9600 XT. In order to save space on the back plate to allow for maximum features on this board, the main output sockets have been moved to a rather complex-looking cable. There are two VGA ports, one S-Video, one SPIDF, one RCA composite and finally an audio line-out connector. The junction box that we saw on the previous page handles the S-video and composite signals into the board. Once you've got your FM aerial, TV aerial, A/V output and A/V inputs connected, the back end of the card becomes very busy.