May 20, 2006
Review by Eric LaFrance

ATI Theatre 550 pro
ATI Theatre pro chip

The card I'm reviewing is the a product is named the Sapphire "TheatriX". The Theatrix uses the ATI Theatre 550 pro chip, which is made by ATI technologies. ATI is a company that is highly known for their high quality PC graphic cards, their all in one product lines known as the "ALL IN WONDER" and their PC to TV products known as the "TV WONDER" 

Card specs are:
*Theater™ 550 PRO core  
*MPEG-2 video encode support  
*MPEG Audio Encoder with sampling rates of up to 48khz  
*Dolby Digital 2 channel encoding  
*Programmable filters  
*NTSC/PAL  
*Motion adaptive 3D Comb Filtering  
*FM Radio  
*World-Wide Audio Decoder  
*16MB DDR memory controller

Sapphire TheatriX
the box

The package comes with a partial version of PowerCinema 3.0 that includes the TV and radio tuning software, ATI driver disk, users manual and the standard ATI multimedia interface cable that comes with most if not all ATI cards that have a TV tuner. The card itself is not huge, the tuner on the card though is the smallest I have ever seen. Here are the important items in the package minus the flaky users manual and the IR remote control pickup which I'll further talk about on the next page.

what's in the box

The remote
the remote

Multimedia Interface cable, interface
the interface of interface cable

The Sapphire TheatriX AKA Theatre 550 pro
Sapphire TheatriX AKA Theatre 550 pro


My testing setup:
WindowXP home edition with service pack 2 installed
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU (2.0Ghz)
1Gb of Kingston PC3200 HyperX ultra low latency ram
Western Digital Raptor 74Gb 10,000RPM hard drive
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card

Page 2: The experience