Hercules 3D Prophet All-in-Wonder 7500 review

Marketing has made a science out of over-enthusiasm, so when the All-in-Wonder Radeon's manual started with, ñWelcome to the convergence of PC, TV and video!î I didn't honestly expect it to be true.

But the more you play with this card, designed by ATI and now sold by Hercules, the more you begin to believe the hype. In the future, people really might watch telly on computers!

The advantage of watching TV on a PC is that the picture is digitised, so you can do just about anything with it. First, you can record it to hard disk as MPEG2 video, which takes up nearly 50Mb per minute at high quality, so make sure you have 10 or 20 gigabytes free. This recording method is much better than video tape - with perfect pause and instant rewind. And if you let the card keep a running recording of all your viewing - its so-called 'TV-on-demand' mode - you can do wacky stuff like rewinding or pausing live TV.

All this is controlled by the excellent TV software, which makes capturing video or stills and time-shifting easy to get your head around. And these tricks can be done with an (analogue) camcorder as the video source too, making the All-in-Wonder a very capable video-editing card. It comes equipped with Ulead's commendable VideoStudio 5.0 SE for this purpose.

Four other applications play media files, DVDs, VideoCDs and audio CDs, each capable in its own right, and all have virtually identical interfaces. So you use the same method to set a timed recording of a TV programme, as to set the CD player to wake you up at 7am with Motorhead's Ace of Spades. Like the TV software, the DVD player has a fine picture, and will send the Dolby Digital soundtrack out the card's coaxial S/P-DIF to your decoding speakers. The CD player can go online to look up the track names of any audio CD using CDDB.

You also get a Library program for creating playlists, and a Teletext viewer. Teletext was the one area that could be improved. You can perform word searches and browse faster than on a TV, but why is there no easy way to flick back or forward a page? And why does the 7500 display the colour-coded Fastext links when there's no way of using them?

I'd like to see some other additions, such as a remote control, support for setting TV recordings using VideoPlus numbers, and a UK version of the online TV guide, but I'm just being greedy. The All-in-Wonder 7500 already offers a stunning range of features backed up by quality software, and is a bargain when you consider that it's a fast 3D graphics card too. Stuck in a fairly modest 1GHz Athlon it scored 6724 in 3DMark 2000 and 3640 in 3DMark 2001.

So here is a card that really might prompt you to throw away your telly and VCR. Check the system requirements, buy one, then turn to page 130 for details on how to upgrade your hard disk!