First of all, let's say what the AIW 9600 Pro is not. It's not the fastest video card with a TV tuner available, that's the AIW 9800 Pro. The second thing it's not is it's not the 2nd fastest video card with a TV tuner available, that's the AIW 9700 Pro from last year. Having said that, the AIW 9600 Pro is an excellent video card for the money.
If you look at the bundle, it's quite easy to see where it's worth the money. The inclusion of Half Life 2 in the bundle is a definite plus. While HL2 is unlikely to arrive in time for this year, it's still a wonderful addition to the bundle. Basically you can download HL2 once it's available off Steam or get the full version game on CDs via mail. The inclusion of Remote Wonder and the coupon for RWII just adds to the value added proposition of the AIW 9600 Pro.
As to performance, the AIW 9600 Pro fits in at almost exactly half that of the AIW 9800 Pro. With similar core clock speeds and less than ½ the memory bandwidth available to it, the AIW 9600 performs better than I expected. Further, it outperforms the 9600 Pro that ATI released earlier this year. It even comes really close to the performance of the RADEON 9600XT which was recently released by ATI.
For this price point there really isn't much competition for what the AIW RADEON 9600 Pro offers. In terms of competition, the only other card in this class is the Personal Cinema 2 by NVIDIA. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, the PC2 doesn't have near the same performance in DirectX 9 games, nor the seamless integration of the Guide+ TV Listings that the AIW 9600 Pro has. If you want better performance, however, you might opt for the AIW 9700 Pro or AIW 9800 Pro, but those are more expensive than the AIW 9600 Pro.
