ATI TV Wonder™ 650 Combo PCI Express® - Overview

ATI:

The ATI TV Wonder™ 650 Combo loads your system with a complete set of media abilities, transforming your PC into the ultimate entertainment system. Attach an amplified antenna¹ or your TV cable² and you can watch, pause, or record high definition TV on your PC. Even analog TV is made brilliant as the 3D Comb Filter produces a sharp, true-to-life image.

Real life:

Watch, record and pause HD TV on your computer (if you can get it). Attach extra cables for more mess but not alot else. Analog TV might be improved with a filter-thing.

ATI:

Key Features:

Two built-in tuners offering combo tuning for:

• Over-the-air Digital TV / HDTV¹ (ATSC)
• Over-the-air / Cable Analog TV (NTSC)
• Clear-QAM (unscrambled) Digital HD Cable²
• FM Radio

ATI Theater™ Video Processing Technology

• Hardware MPEG-2 compression
• Motion Adaptive 3D Comb Filter
• Automatic Color Control
• Automatic Gain Control
• Noise Reduction
• Edge Enhancement

ATI Catalyst Media Center™ featuring:

• Full PVR and time shifting functionality
• DVD Playback Software^3,4
• DVD Authoring Software^3,4,5
• ATI Theater™ Video Converter

AMD LIVE!™ CD featuring AMD LIVE! On Demand

Real life:

1. Two tuners make for a lot of TV or Radio

2. ATI Theater-thingy does some clever stuff to make it look better

3. ATI Catalyst Media Center plays the stuff you’d expect it to play.

4.AMD LIVE! shouts at you alot and features some On Demand-thingy

ATI :

Bring HDTV To Your PC

• Watch, pause or schedule recordings of your favorite TV programs
• Watch analog TV while recording digital TV at the same time, with Combo tuner functionality
• Find your favorite programs with the advanced Electronic Programming Guide
• Convert video to fill your portable media player or stream to your media center extender device
• Access your PVR from a broadband-connected computer with AMD LIVE!™ On Demand
• With the advent of Windows Vista®, digital cable reception of Clear-QAM channels (unencrypted Digital Cable TV) is now possible. Enrich your Digital Cable TV media experience with ATI Catalyst Media Center™ in Windows Vista® with full Clear-QAM TV clarity²

Real life:

Watch TV like you would with Sky Plus

Record and play at the same time, like Sky Plus

Has an EPG, like most TV products

Change video from one format to the other to work on your video player-thingy or make it go across the air magically to your wireless bucket of files

Access a thingy from anywhere with AMD LIVE!

Because of Vista, you can watch a few more TV channels.

Why don’t we have a competition? Who can turn the marketing babble into the best blog post??

SimCity Societies offers a different way of gaming compared to its predecessor, SimCity 4. Instead of having to zone areas, and manage a large city and the region around it, you have to micromanage and create individual buildings.

The game is based around six different ‘societal values’:

‘Production’, ‘Prosperity’, ‘Creativity’, ‘Spirituality’, ‘Authority’ and ‘Knowledge’

The idea is that certain buildings require different values, and certain values generate other values. Every building consumes or produces at least one of these. Houses and workplaces generally ‘use’ values, while decorations and venues generate. On paper it sounds good, but it doesn’t really work in the game. You find yourself often having to place many of the same decorations in a ‘block’ so that other buildings function.

Houses offer so many ‘job ready’ people, which is often a small percentage of the population in the house. Workplaces offer so many job places, and at the end of the working day, inject some money into the treasury, as well as often ‘taking’ some of a Sim’s happiness. Decorations just generate a ‘societal value,’ normally just one of the above. Venues change Sims happiness, often from bad or OK to good.

The happiness of the Sims in your town is generally down to the buildings you place. Don’t place enough venues, and you’ll get rogue Sims intent on tearing down your city or Sims playing Hooky and not going to work. Place enough venues and you will have a city full of contented Sims who are happy with life.

Graphics:

The graphics are generally good, although the decorations start to get a bit repetitive after a while. There are all the options in the settings that you could ever want…

· Shadow detail

· Texture detail

· Reflections

· Anti-aliasing

· Terrain detail

· Particle level

· Filtering

· Rear clipping plane

· Detail clipping

· Map apron detail

· Lighting quality

· Shaders

On / Off – Bloom & Specular

Most of these go from Low -> High, but a few can be turned off or set to Ultra.

After finding out what some of these meant (filtering – clarifies and sharpens object in the distance, rear clipping plane – changes the distance at which objects become visible to the camera), I looked to the minimum specifications.

• CPU – 1.7 GHz XP, 2.4 GHz Vista
• RAM – 512MB XP, 1GB Vista (yeah right)
• Hard Drive – 2.1GB
• GPU – 128MB DX9c

To begin with, I thought SimCity Societies was a terrible game overall. However, after playing on it for a few hours, I realised it wasn’t a rubbish game, it just looks rubbish in comparison with it’s elder brothers.