ATI has traditionally released All in Wonder cards with every new release of their main video card chipsets. Sometimes, they release the card a little bit underpowered compared to the top of the line, sometimes it's equal. Generally, the direction they took with their main card also reflected upon their AIW line. I've used ATI AIW cards for years, since the original AIW based upon the Rage Pro Turbo chipset back from 1997. The cards include the AIW, the AIW Pro, AIW Radeon, AIW Radeon 7500, AIW 8500DV, AIW 8500 128MB, AIW Radeon 9000, AIW 9700 Pro and now the AIW Radeon VE.

There's a gap, however, in ATI's AIW lineup. For the last 6 years ATI has mainly manufactured AGP video cards. The AGP interface (Accelerated Graphics Port) provided more bandwidth from the video card to the system than the PCI bus. AGP1x is 66MHz which when multiplied by a 32bit bus is 266 Megabytes of memory bandwidth a second (66.6x32/8 (8bits per byte).

The PCI bus, by contrast, provides 132 Megabytes of bandwidth. Today, video cards such as the Radeon 9700 Pro are using AGP8x, which provides 2.1GB of memory bandwidth. While one could argue that AGP8x is useless today in most instances, the bandwidth is needed in some cases. In fact, one of the things I'll be testing in this review will be what affect going from a PCI to an AGP card will have based upon the same card. The last AIW product that had a PCI interface was the AIW Rage 128 PCI, which was 3 generations ago in their product mix.

So why make a PCI video card? One of the problems today is the proliferation of Intel based integrated video on motherboards. According to Jon Peddie Associates, 28% of the total graphics card market is made up of Intel solutions. Many of the motherboards based on Intel chipsets have no AGP port. Quite frankly, while integrated video is fine for normal people's use of computers, there's a need for some to get better performance from their video card. Almost every modern motherboard has a PCI slot, not all of them have an AGP slot.

ATI probably wouldn't see much benefit using a more modern chip for the AIW line on their AIW VE. While a Radeon 9000 PCI exists, the target market for this card and the price of the card would have made a AIW 9000 VE, cost more to manufacture. As the market for $129 video cards is much bigger than a market for $199 videocards (which a 9000 AIW PCI would likely cost), the choice of the 7500 makes sense.