Our testing methods
Today we'll be focusing on the All-in-Wonder X800 XT's video capture and tuner performance against that of an All-in-Wonder 9600 XT. Although the X800 XT packs considerably more pixel-pushing power, the two cards actually feature the same video decoder chip, and as you'll see, their capture and tuner performances are well matched. Unfortunately, software incompatibilities prevent us from directly comparing the AIW with a hardware-accelerated MPEG2 card. Hardware MPEG2 cards, including ATI's own TV Wonder Elite, don't work with ATI's Multimedia Center software. The AIW X800 XT's tuner isn't supported by Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 or BeyondTV, either.

While today's focus is on the All-in-Wonder X800 XT's video capture and tuner performance, don't forget that the card also has a potent GPU. For more on the card's 3D performance, see our recent AGP Radeon round-up.

All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test system.

Processor Athlon 64 FX-53 2.4GHz
System bus HT 16-bit/1GHz downstream
Motherboard Abit AV8
BIOS revision VIA K8T800 Pro
North bridge VIA K8T800 Pro
South bridge VIA VT8237
Chipset drivers Hyperion 4.56
Memory size 1GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type OCZ PC3200 EL Platinum Rev 2 DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
CAS latency (CL) 2
RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) 2
RAS precharge (tRP) 2
Cycle time (tRAS) 5
Hard drives Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 NCQ 120GB SATA
Audio VT8237/ALC658
Audio drivers Realtek 3.71
Graphics 1 ATI All-in-Wonder 9600 XT 128MB with CATALYST 5.5 drivers
Graphics 2 ATI All-in-Wonder X800 XT 256MB with CATALYST 5.5 drivers
OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 2, DirectX 9.0c

Thanks to OCZ for providing us with memory for our testing. If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, OCZ's RAM is definitely worth considering.

Also, our test system was powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor's Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

  • ATI Multimedia Center 9.08

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. All of the 3D gaming tests used the highest possible detail image quality settings except where otherwise noted.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.