• Radeon 7500 chipset on a PCI bus
• 64MB of DDR memory
• 250/250MHz core/memory clock-speed
• Full DirectX 7.0 feature support including HW TCL (Transform Clipping and Lighting), 3 textures per pixel per pass rendering, EMBM (Environmental Mapped Bump. Mapping)
• Pixel Tapesty engine
• Charisma Engine
• 40 Million Polygons per second
• Theater 200 chipset
• 125 Channel Stereo TV Tuner
• Guide+ Plus TV Listings Guide
• MMC 7.9 (Multimedia Center 7.9 (the latest version is 8.0 present only currently on the AIW Radeon 9700 Pro) with ATI's DVD Player, VCD, CD Player

The Radeon 7500 was released late in 2001 at the same time as ATI's Radeon 8500. Based upon the original Radeon released in summer 2000, the Radeon 7500 is a die reduced, cost reduced, higher performing Radeon 64MB. Released at 183/183MHz, the original Radeon was speed bumped on the original 7500 to 290/230 MHz core/memory. The speed on the AIW VE is 250/250, which is a rather balanced coire/memory speed. Based upon a .15um die, instead of the .18 of the original Radeon, the 7500 runs at a much faster, but also cooler than the previous card.

The 7500 supports all of the features of DirectX 7.0. It has a first generation pixel shader, which is not compliant with the pixel shaders of DirectX 8.0. Games that use Pixel Shader 1.0 or above won't run the effects. It's rather unfortunate, since I love games like Morrowind, Tiger Woods 2003, and Command and Conquer Generals that use pixel shaders to give realistic looking water. The Radeon 7500 does, however support other features like 3 textures a pass rendering, hardware transform and lighting, environmental mapped bump mapping and FSAA (full scene anti-aliasing). For it's target market, that of replacing a integrated Intel video card that doesn't support these features, it's a step up

The Theater 200 is the same chip used in ATI's AIW Radeon 9700 Pro. It's ATI's successor chip to their Rage Theater chip first introduced in the All In Wonder Pro back in 1997. ATI introduced a digital tuner in their AIW 8500DV, but went back to a analog one in the AIW Radeon 9700 Pro, AIW 9000 Pro and now the AIW VE. The AIW VE is a fully functional 125 channel TV Tuner.

Multimedia 7.9 is ATI's latest Multimedia Center version available to their 7000/8000/9000 (not AIW 9700 Pro). The suite of software includes a full-function DVD player with support for motion compensation and other features, a TV Tuner, a VCD player, a CD Player, a file-player (for MP3s etc), the TV Listings button from Guide+ Plus and the Library, which keeps the various file types in order.

It's been a long time since I've installed a PCI video card. Not that there's anything wrong with a PCI video card, but the last one I installed on any computer was a ATI Rage Pro Turbo back in 1998. Installation was a snap; I removed my AGP card, and chose PCI slot #1 on my nForce2 based Asus A7N8x Deluxe. After a format/reinstall of Windows (always do that for a video card review), and install of the CD drivers, I installed the 3.1 Catalyst drivers. At no point was there a problem with installation.