eBay AIW 9600 cards: bargain or boondoggle?
 

First, let me say that I am very much looking forward to a professionally assembled and tested capture system:). Still, I sometimes haunt eBay. Last week (before I went upscale), I found this:

ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Card.

At $14.95 I thought, "What the heck." I ordered two of them; they arrived today. While I don't currently have an XP PC to place them in, I did find a refurbished Dell with AGP slot and Windows XP elsewhere on eBay; it should arrive soon. While the cards arrived in a Ziplock baggie ("OEM packaging?"), they did include the S-Video and composite input breakout box and appear to be in new condition as advertised.

So did I get a bargain which might come in handy as a spare in future? Or was this a waste of good money?

(By the way, if anyone's interested...the seller still has more of them as of this writing.)

That seller is an a-hole. If you ask him a question before buying, he'll block you.

His cards are incomplete, and you bought a paper weight. Several other on this site have been conned already, and most have returned their useless cards. ATI AIW 9600 cards have all output and inputs on a single dongle. That item is missing. No way to even plug in a monitor to the card.

The auction claims "tested", but tested how? The monitor output is missing! :huh1:

Perfect example of a shady eBay seller peddling gear to members of this hobby/pro community. Newbies get taken by this sort of stuff far too often. Same issues exist with TBCs, VCRs, etc. Buyer beware.

Note that he has at least one negative feedback for non-working AIW card already, and lack of communication. I wonder if that was a member of this site?

Message received. Well, for thirty bucks I was willing to take a chance. If that's the biggest mistake I make this year, it's going to be a very good year.

I get the feeling that this person knows almost nothing about ATI AIW, or computer in general.
Furthermore, I think he never really even looked in the boxes.

Now that you have one, what are the contents of said box? :question:

Put it all on the floor, snap a photo, attach it to a reply.

Sorry, I got distracted. Go here:

https://ehbowen.net.../photo_50726...353133382e6a7067

Clockwise from bottom left:

• Instruction card
• Video input breakout box
• (Plastic envelopes at top)
• Video card
• Velcro strips
• Software installation CD

And that was it. Like you said, without the OUTPUT breakout box, which the card calls for but was not included in the package, it probably will not be a whole lot of use.

The capture part is complete, you only need an output for Windows. You have more options for that:
- Motherboard with two videocard slots?
- CPU (+motherboard support) with built-in GPU?
- Try to figure out the pin layout from PCB
- Try this schematic (Comp Vout should be doable, but not really high quality); http://pinouts.ru/VideoCables/ati_le5_pinout.shtml
(- External control PC, remote desktop)

That doesn't work. In order for an ATI AIW to capture, it must also be the primary video/graphics card. So you either entirely use an ATI AIW, or not at all.

Several forum posts already figured this out. But the info itself is still useless, as it get you no closer to actually having the piece of hardware required.