When considering any video card, one has to realize the target market, the price, value, features of the card and the bundle as well as the performance. Many reviewers focus too much on game performance, in my opinion. I hope I gave you as complete a picture of this card as possible without needing to read my opinion on the card. That is the nature of a good review, in my opinion. Normally in reviews we give a breakdown score, but in this instance, I think it's important to look at the whole picture.

Let’s talk about the target market. With 28% of the computers sold today with Intel "Extreme Graphics", whose performance rivals that of 1999's TNT2/Rage128 level, there's an important segment of the market that isn't currently served by any modern video card from the two major manufacturers, ATI and NVIDIA. Some of these motherboards come with AGP slots, and for those boards, I would suggest a AIW 8500 or the big brother, the AIW 9700 Pro. However, the price point is vastly different than the market for this card.

The price point ties into the targeted market. With a price point of $129, this card is well positioned for people who don't care about the fastest greatest video card and has compelling features such as Video Immersion, a TV tuner and Pinnacle Studio 8 (ATI version) which makes it worth it's price. There are certainly other cards in this category, such as the Geforce4 MX based Personal Cinema, but with a pricepoint $70 below the PC, the value in this segment is clear.

As to features, the AIW Radeon VE has the full DirectX 7.0 feature set. Many games, thanks to the evangelization of the feature by Matrox use EMBM (Environmental Mapped Bump Mapping), which makes it an important feature to support. Quite frankly, as a PCI card, the amount of bandwidth to the card from the PCI bus would limit any use of pixel/vertex shaders in any kind of operation. It would also limit geometry, and fill-rate, which makes the card about the maximum one can expect from a PCI, based video card.

As to performance, quite frankly, if you're buying a video card today for performance, I would suggest a AGP card. The difference between a AIW 9700 Pro and the 7500 PCI card, in terms of performance are clear. It was not my intention to show performance differences between a 9700 Pro and 7500 PCI, but to give as complete a picture as possible as to where this card sits in comparison to today's fastest card.

1. Performance 5
2. Features 7 (TV Tuner features partially overcome the use of the 7500 chipset as a minus)
3. Compatibility 9
4. Price 9
5. Availability 9 (readily available on pricewatch)
6. setup 10
7. Overall Value 8
8. ease of use 10
9. Support 10
10. Software 9
    Total: 86