AIW + X1900 = AIW X1900?
Take, for instance, the 3D graphics and gaming capabilities of the AIW X1900. This card is based on the Radeon X1900 GPU, but it runs at different clock speeds than the familiar Radeon X1900 models XT and XTX, so its performance will be quite a bit different. In fact, in place of the stratospheric 600MHz-plus clock speeds of the other members of the X1900 family, the AIW’s frequencies are rather modest: 500MHz for the GPU and 480MHz (or 960MHz DDR) for the card’s 256MB of GDDR3 memory. That’s exactly the same core clock as the Radeon X1800 XL and a slightly lower memory speed. Combined with the Radeon X1900 GPU’s basic architecture, these clock speeds give the AIW X1900 eight gigapixels per second of pixel-pushing power and just over 30GB per second of memory bandwidthvirtually the same as the Radeon X1800 XL and in the same neighborhood as NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GT.
Those numbers would practically be fate for the AIW X1900 if not for one thing: the Radeon X1900 GPU architecture crams fully 48 pixel shader processor units on a single chip, so the AIW X1900 should be a massive leap in computational power over the Radeon X1800 XL. One way to roughly compare pixel shader power between GPUs with the same basic heritage is to look at the number of pixel shader cycles per second running on the chip. At 500MHz with 16 pixel shader processors, the Radeon X1800 XL churns through 8 billion pixel shader cycles per second. The higher end Radeon X1800 XT pushes 10 billion. But thanks to its 48 shaders running at 500MHz, the AIW X1900 rips through 24 billion pixel shader cycles each second. That’s considerably more shader power than even the very high end of ATI’s last generation GPU lineupwhich seems eerie to say since the Radeon X1800 series was only just released in October.
Comparing pixel shader cycles across GPU architectures is quite a bit trickier, because different shader units have divergent types of execution resources onboard capable of handling different mixes of math each clock cycle. Right now, it seems NVIDIA’s GPU are performing better on a per-clock basis in most applications, perhaps in part because of the G70 GPU’s focus on executing lots of MADD instructions. That said, the GeForce 7800 GTX’s 24 pixel shader units running at 430MHz endow it with just over 10.3 billion pixel shader cycles per second. Obviously, at 24 billion, the AIW is a dead-serious challenger to the GeForce 7800 GT’s bigger brother, despite a pixel fill rate and memory bandwidth more comparable to the GT than the GTX.
The 3D graphics power of this thing is considerable, but there is no close analog to it on the market right now. I expectand hopethat the release of the AIW X1900 at these clock speeds presages the release of a non-AIW Radeon X1900 card with the same basic clock speeds and memory size for $50 to $100 less. That would be a very nice development, indeed, and finally put ATI back into contention versus NVIDIA in a segment of the market above $169 and below $499. For now, though, the AIW X1900 is ATI’s only contender in high-end graphics under $500. Fortunately, it can most likely fend for itself.
So, you see, summing up the AIW X1900 isn’t quite as simple as mashing together the AIW feature set with a Radeon X1900 cardand that’s just the 3D part.
The AIW X1900 card itself comes dressed in a purple-and-gold color scheme that’s more muted than the fire-engine-red ATI standard, yet somehow has a higher bling factor. It’s regal, I guess. Like all X1900s, it comes in PCI Express flavor only, at least for now, but the AIW X1900 has a decidedly different port configuration than most video cards. Believe it or not, all of the AIW X1900’s ample array of I/O options will pass through one of the four ports on the back of the card; there’s no separate back plate or drive-bay insert needed.
At the bottom left of the card in the picture above, you can see a rectangular gold plating covering the AIW’s TV tuner. That’s a Microtune 2121 silicon tuner, the device that receives RF signals from over-the-air broadcasts or the cable TV network and coverts them into analog video streams. This tuner works in concert with ATI’s own Theater 200 video decoder chip, which is on the underside of the board and not shown in the picture above. The Theater 200 translates analog video streams into digital data for computer use, handling the analog-to-digital conversion, filtering, and scaling.
This combo of the Microtune 2121 and the Theater 200 have been powering AIW cards since the release of the All-In-Wonder X800 XT, and little has changed on the AIW X1900. ATI does have the newer Theater 550 video chip with hardware MPEG2 encoding, and we found it to be excellent in our round-up of stand-alone TV tuner cards not long ago. However, ATI has yet to integrate the Theater 550 on an All-In-Wonder.
The total, complete, borderline-intimidating package
From the four ports pictured above spring all of the input and output connections necessary to make an All-In-Wonder feature set possible. The left-most port is where you connect the antenna for the FM tuner, and next to it is the port for the coaxial input from the cable network or a TV antenna. On the far right is a DVI port for connection to a computer monitor; it can also be used with a VGA-to-DVI converter, but ATI doesn’t supply one with the AIW X1900. That’s because you can get a VGA output from the small black port in the middle, along with lots of other things.
This is the dongle that plugs into that square, black connector next to the DVI port. From it comes a blue VGA connector, a black video output port, and a purple video input port. These last two ports don’t connect to a video source or destination directly; instead, they feed ATI’s stackable input and output blocks.
These fancy plastic doodads are the I/O blocks, which use a Lego-like connection to stay fastened together. The block on the top plugs into the purple port on the dongle and has inputs for S-Video, composite video, and left and right stereo audio channels. This is where you can hook up your VCR in order to pull family videos into your PC. The middle block is the opposite deal; it’s for output of the same sorts of things. The connector block on the bottom is for component video output to HDTVs and the like. The trio of green, red, and blue ports are the three traditional component outputs, while the red and white ports on the right areyou guessed itleft and right audio out. The two output blocks cannot be used simultaneously. The card will drive either one of them, but not both at once.
Here’s the other end of the cable coming from the component video output block. The red plug connects to the dongle. You can also see the green connector for analog audio. This plugs into the line out on the PC’s sound card, and it has a pass-through for external speaker systems. There’s also an orange SPDIF output plug, and a blue plug for analog audio output.
The other end of the composite/S-Video output cable is essentially the same as the component one, and the purple cable from the input block is nice and simple.
Even more of the total, complete, borderline-intimidating package
Here’s one of the occupational hazards of being an AIW X1900 owner. Add up all of the AIW’s amazing number of input and output capabilities, and you have more cables than Comcast. This is an example of all of the things that might possibly be hanging out the back of this card at once, including a pair of those I/O blocks and an FM antenna. Of course, I don’t have anything connected to the I/O blocks, or you’d see even more spaghetti in the picture above.
Obviously, this mess of connectors and wires is necessary in order to achieve all of the AIW’s potential purposes, and most folks won’t have all of these things connected to their PCs at once. Still, I think this is a good illustration of one reason why the AIW may not always be suited for one of its purported roles: as the heart of a home theater PC. The cascading series of dongle, cables, and output block required to supply component video output, for instance, isn’t especially elegant when hanging out the back of an entertainment center. I’d prefer a video card with Y, Pr, and Pb ports coming out of a simple, three-way output adapter.
The AIW X1900 comes with the very latest in ATI’s series of Remote Wonder remote controls, the Remote Wonder Plus. Like previous Remote Wonders, this device uses RF rather than infrared to communicate with its receiver, giving it a little more range and a lot more reliability. You don’t have to point this remote at the receiver, although the infrared-trained will find it hard to resist, which can make for hours of unintentional comedy.
Compared to past revisions, the Remote Wonder Plus is smaller and feels cheaper in the hand. The Remote Wonder II packaged with the AIW X800 XT feels more substantial. However, the button layout on the Plus is easily superior and more intuitive, especially the joint volume up-down buttons. I also prefer the tapered shape of the Plus when using the pointer “mushroom” to control the mouse pointer.
The primary purpose of the Remote Wonder is to navigate ATI’s own from-the-couch interface, known as EazyLook, for the AIW’s do-everything software suite known as Multimedia Center. The Remote Wonder Plus does that quite well, but it’s also fully programmable, and it has templates to work with a handful of popular applications. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Remote Wonder Plus worksquite well and without any special setupwith Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. In fact, the new button layout on the Remote Wonder Plus maps quite naturally (though not perfectly) to the Media Center control scheme. The fact that the Plus has a fairly decent pointing device built in may make it a better remote for your Windows MCE PC than Microsoft’s own.
Unfortunately, recent versions of ATI’s Remote Wonder software seem to have a tendency to crash for no reason, robbing one of control of the PC and throwing an error message:
I’ve noticed this problem lately as a regular user of the Remote Wonder, but I was surprised to see it show up with the Remote Wonder Plus on our newly installed Windows XP MCE 2005 test system. If the instability is caused by a software conflict, it must be conflict with a very common system-level driver or the like.
In order to take advantage of all of the AIW’s multimedia capabilities, the AIW X1900 ships with three software CDs. The first of these is ATI’s Catalyst Software suite, which includes a whole slew of drivers for the graphics card, TV tuner, and Remote Wonder Plus, along with ATI’s Multimedia Center package. Multimedia Center is ATI’s semi-integrated suite of programs for playing DVDs, compressed audio and video files, CDs, FM radio, and television. We covered version 9.08 of Multimedia Center at some length in our AIW X800 XT review. The app is now up to version 9.13, and all that has changed is bug fixes and support for newer hardware. Our gripes with this program remain the same: the TV app isn’t integrated nearly well enough with the GuidePlus+ program guide software, the TiVo-like PVR functionality can’t record silently in the background, and ATI’s EasyLook interface can’t really be used as the sole means of navigation, to name a few. ATI has all of the right pieces in place, but they haven’t glued them together properly yet. The bottom line is that Multimedia Center can enable many of the AIW’s multimedia playback capabilities, but those serious about using an AIW as a PVR will want to look toward Windows XP MCE 2005, Snapstream Beyond TV, or some similar package for PVR and HTPC functionality.
On the brighter side, ATI has now added two very well regarded Adobe programs to the All-In-Wonder software suite, Premiere Elements 2.0 and Photoshop Elements 4.0. These programs add quite a bit of value to the AIW X1900 package for those who don’t have them already, and Premiere Elements in particular should make the AIW package ready to use out of the box for serious video editing work.
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least three times, and the results were averaged.
Our test systems were configured like so:
Processor | Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.4GHz | |
System bus | 1GHz HyperTransport | |
Motherboard | Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe | ATI RD480 CrossFire reference board |
BIOS revision | 0806 | 080012 |
North bridge | nForce4 SLI X16 | Radeon Xpress 200P CrossFire Edition |
South bridge | SB450 | |
Chipset drivers | SMBus driver 4.50 | SMBus driver 5.10.1000.5 |
Memory size | 2GB (2 DIMMs) | 2GB (2 DIMMs) |
Memory type | Crucial PC3200 DDR SDRAM at 400MHz | Crucial PC3200 DDR SDRAM at 400MHz |
CAS latency (CL) | 2.5 | 2.5 |
RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) | 3 | 3 |
RAS precharge (tRP) | 3 | 3 |
Cycle time (tRAS) | 8 | 8 |
Hard drive | Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB SATA 150 | Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB SATA 150 |
Audio | Integrated nForce4/ALC850 with Realtek 5.10.0.5900 drivers | Integrated SB450/ALC880 with Realtek 5.10.00.5188 drivers |
Graphics | GeForce 6800 GS 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 81.98 drivers |
Radeon X1800 XL 256MB PCI-E with Catalyst 8-203-3-060104a-029367E drivers |
Dual GeForce 6800 GS 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 81.98 drivers |
Radeon X1800 XT 512MB PCI-E with Catalyst 8-203-3-060104a-029367E drivers |
|
XFX GeForce 7800 GT 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 81.98 drivers |
Radeon X1800 CrossFire + Radeon X1800 XT 512MB PCI-E with Catalyst 8-203-3-060104a-029367E drivers |
|
Dual XFX GeForce 7800 GT 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 81.98 drivers |
Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E with Catalyst 8-203-3-060104a-029367E drivers |
|
MSI GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 81.98 drivers |
Radeon X1900 CrossFire 512MB PCI-E with Catalyst 8-203-3-060104a-029367E drivers |
|
Dual MSI GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 81.98 drivers |
Radeon X1900 CrossFire + Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E with Catalyst 8-203-3-060104a-029367E drivers |
|
GeForce 7800 GTX 512 512MB PCI-E with ForceWare 81.98 drivers |
All-in-Wonder X1900 256MB PCI-E with Catalyst 8-203-3-060104a-029367E drivers |
|
Dual GeForce 7800 GTX 512 512MB PCI-E with ForceWare 81.98 drivers |
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OS | Windows XP Professional (32-bit) | |
OS updates | Service Pack 2, DirectX 9.0c SDK update (December 2005) |
Thanks to Crucial for providing us with memory for our testing. 2GB of RAM seems to be the new standard for most folks, and Crucial hooked us up with some of its 1GB DIMMs for testing. Although these particular modules are rated for CAS 3 at 400MHz, they ran perfectly for us at 2.5-3-3-8 with 2.85V.
All of our test systems were powered by OCZ PowerStream 520W power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor’s Choice winners in our last PSU round-up.
Unless otherwise specified, the image quality settings for both ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards were left at the control panel defaults.
The test systems’ Windows desktops were set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.
We used the following versions of our test applications:
- Quake 4 1.05 Beta with trq4demo1 demo
- Battlefield 2 1.12
- Guild Wars
- FEAR 1.02
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast with trcoast1 demo
- FutureMark 3DMark06 Build 1.0.2
- FRAPS 2.7.2
The tests and methods we employ are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.
Pixel-pushing power
We’ve already discussed how the AIW X1900 compares to some of its closest competitors in terms of pixel shader capabilities and pixel fill rate. Here’s a closer look at some of the AIW X1900’s key stats and how they compare to other recent graphics cards.
Core clock (MHz) |
Pixels/ clock |
Peak fill rate (Mpixels/s) |
Textures/ clock |
Peak fill rate (Mtexels/s) |
Memory clock (MHz) |
Memory bus width (bits) |
Peak memory bandwidth (GB/s) |
|
Radeon X1600 XT | 590 | 4 | 2360 | 4 | 2360 | 1380 | 128 | 22.1 |
GeForce 6800 | 325 | 8 | 2600 | 12 | 3900 | 700 | 256 | 22.4 |
GeForce 6600 GT | 500 | 4 | 2000 | 8 | 4000 | 1000 | 128 | 16.0 |
Radeon X800 | 400 | 12 | 4800 | 12 | 4800 | 700 | 256 | 22.4 |
GeForce 6800 GS | 425 | 8 | 3400 | 12 | 5100 | 1000 | 256 | 32.0 |
GeForce 6800 GT | 350 | 16 | 5600 | 16 | 5600 | 1000 | 256 | 32.0 |
Radeon X800 XL | 400 | 16 | 6400 | 16 | 6400 | 980 | 256 | 31.4 |
GeForce 6800 Ultra | 425 | 16 | 6800 | 16 | 6800 | 1100 | 256 | 35.2 |
GeForce 7800 GT | 400 | 16 | 6400 | 20 | 8000 | 1000 | 256 | 32.0 |
All-In-Wonder X1900 | 500 | 16 | 8000 | 16 | 8000 | 960 | 256 | 30.7 |
Radeon X1800 XL | 500 | 16 | 8000 | 16 | 8000 | 1000 | 256 | 32.0 |
Radeon X850 XT | 520 | 16 | 8320 | 16 | 8320 | 1120 | 256 | 35.8 |
Radeon X850 XT PE | 540 | 16 | 8640 | 16 | 8640 | 1180 | 256 | 37.8 |
XFX GeForce 7800 GT | 450 | 16 | 7200 | 20 | 9000 | 1050 | 256 | 33.6 |
Radeon X1800 XT | 625 | 16 | 10000 | 16 | 10000 | 1500 | 256 | 48.0 |
Radeon X1900 XT | 625 | 16 | 10000 | 16 | 10000 | 1450 | 256 | 46.4 |
GeForce 7800 GTX | 430 | 16 | 6880 | 24 | 10320 | 1200 | 256 | 38.4 |
Radeon X1900 XTX | 650 | 16 | 10400 | 16 | 10400 | 1550 | 256 | 49.6 |
GeForce 7800 GTX 512 | 550 | 16 | 8800 | 24 | 13200 | 1700 | 256 | 54.4 |
The AIW X1900 slots in right next to the Radeon X1800 XL and GeForce 7800 GT. Despite the R580 GPU’s 48 pixel shader units, it can only draw and texture 16 pixels per clock, like its predecessor. Let’s have a look at how these numbers play out in 3DMark’s basic fill rate tests.
The AIW X1900’s slightly slower memory clock speeds keep it from matching the Radeon X1800 XL in the single-textured fill rate test, but the AIW virtually ties the X1800 XL in the multitexturing test, which probably counts for more. Remember, though, that the AIW’s pixel shading power could help it overachieve for a card with these peak fill rate numbers.
Quake 4
We tested Quake 4 using our own custom-recorded timedemo. The game was running at its “Ultra” quality settings with 4X antialiasing enabled.
The AIW’s additional pixel shaders don’t help much at all in Quake 4, where the AIW turns in passable but not stellar frame rates. Most folks will probably want to run this card in Q4’s “High Quality” mode instead of “Ultra,” given these frame rates.
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
This new expansion level for Half-Life 2 makes use of high-dynamic-range lighting and some nice pixel shader effects to create an impressive-looking waterfront. We tested with HDR lighting enabled on all cards.
The story is very different in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast with its HDR lighting and more liberal use of pixel shader effects. The AIW X1900 runs neck and neck with the Radeon X1800 XT and GeForce 7800 GTX, showing us the first glimpse of its true potential for 3D gaming.
F.E.A.R.
We tested the next few games using FRAPS and playing through a portion of the game manually. For these games, we played through five 60-second gaming sessions per config and captured average and low frame rates for each. The average frames per second number is the mean of the average frame rates from all five sessions. We also chose to report the median of the low frame rates from all five sessions, in order to rule out outliers. We found that these methods gave us reasonably consistent results.
All of the F.E.A.R.’s graphics quality options were all set to maximum for our testing. Computer performance was set to medium.
Not only does the AIW X1900 practically tie the Radeon X1800 XT, it easily outdoes the GeForce 7800 GTX with a higher average frame rate and a higher median low frame rate, too.
Battlefield 2
We’re testing BF2 at an insanely high resolution because it runs really well on just about any of these cards at lower resolutions. Also, BF2 has a built-in frame rate cap of 100 FPS. We didn’t want to turn off the cap, but we did want to see some differences in performance between the cards.
Once again, the AIW X1900 puts in a strong showing here, edging out the 7800 GTX.
Guild Wars
Like the two above, we played this game manually and recorded frame rates with FRAPS. In this case, we’re playing an online game, so frame rates were subject to some influence from an uncontrollable outside factor. Regardless, I think the numbers below reflect performance pretty well.
Guild Wars looks pretty, but it doesn’t seem to put much of a premium on pixel shaders. The AIW is quite playable at 1920×1440 given the nature of this game, though, so I can’t complain.
3DMark06
This will be our first foray into 3DMark06. Let’s see what it can show us about these cards.
The AIW X1900 looks to be a very close match for the GeForce 7800 GTX in 3DMark06. At the same basic clock speeds, the older Radeon X1800 XL just can’t keep pace with the shader-rich AIW X1900.
ShaderMark
Next up is ShaderMark, one of the few synthetic pixel shader benchmarks around. These numbers should give you some idea how each of these cards runs various types of pixel shader programs. I’ve provided an average of each card’s frame rates in the various ShaderMark tests in order to provide some sense of overall performance, and I’ve also graphed all of the individual results for those who wish to see ’em.
As we saw in our Radeon X1900 review, the 48 pixel shaders in the Radeon X1900 GPU don’t really show up like one might hope in ShaderMark. The question is: is it the GPU or the benchmark? Perhaps ShaderMark is more limited by memory bandwidth or texture throughput, or perhaps the Radeon X1900 GPU has other internal limitations that keep it from realizing its full pixel shading potential.
Power consumption
We measured total system power consumption at the wall socket using a watt meter. The monitor was plugged into a separate outlet, so its power draw was not part of our measurement. The idle measurements were taken at the Windows desktop with AMD’s Cool’n’Quiet CPU clock throttling function enabled. The cards were tested under load running Half-Life 2: Lost coast at 1600×1200 resolution with 16X anisotropic filtering and HDR lighting enabled. We turned off Cool’n’Quiet for testing under load.
All of the graphics cards named below except for the two CrossFire setups were tested for power consumption on the Asus A8N32-SLI mobo. We were forced to use the ATI CrossFire reference mobo, of course, for the CrossFire cards, so power consumption for the CrossFire systems will vary due to the difference in motherboards. Also, please note that the Radeon X1900 XT card shown here is actually the CrossFire master card, so its power consumption is probably slightly higher than a non-CrossFire X1900 XT that lacks the additional chips needed for image compositing.
I believe that our Radeon X1800 XL and XT cards are not wholly representative of the idle power consumption of retail cards, either. Our cards are early review units that lack the idle clock throttling we’ve observed in newer Radeon X1800 cards. Our Radeon X1900 review samples, however, do settle down to somewhat lower clock speeds at idle in order to save power and cut down on heat. Unfortunately, our AIW X1900 does not.
With its onboard TV tuner, Theater 200 chip, and an absolutely massive GPU, the AIW X1900 uses more power at idle than most cards, but not by a huge margin. Under load, the AIW pulls a little more juice than a GeForce 7800 GTX but less than the Radeon X1800 XT.
Subjectively speaking, the AIW X1900 is generally a good citizen in terms of heat, as well. Its single-slot cooler is usually relatively quiet, even when running 3D applications or doing video playback. However, like most of today’s high-end graphics cards, this thing does run very hot. ATI seems to have tuned the cooler to allow the card to reach some pretty high temperatures before spinning up its blower.
Windows XP MCE 2005 TV tuning
We’ve already tested the performance of this same AIW tuner hardware in ATI’s Multimedia Center, so I wanted to turn my attention to a different questionnamely, performance in Windows XP Media Center Edition. In order to conduct these tests, I installed Windows XP MCE 2005 and all of the latest updates, up to the January 2006 Update Rollup, on our ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition test system.
There has apparently been some confusion on this point, but all of ATI’s All-In-Wonder cards from the 9600 forward are capable of acting as TV tuners for Windows XP MCE 2005. All that’s required is a separate download of an encoder software layer from ATI’s web site. This encoder came bundled with our AIW X1900 review unit and was installed automatically on our Windows MCE test system by ATI’s automated setup program.
The caveat here is that the AIW cards lack MPEG2 hardware encoding, so they’re prone to use quite a bit of CPU time when recording programsand even more when recording and playing back video at the same time. To see how the AIW measured up as an MCE tuner, I tested it against a cheapo Conexant CX23880-based TV tuner card with hardware-based MPEG2 encoding. This first test shows CPU utilization while recording a program in the background as the system is otherwise idle. Remember: the CPU in our test rig is the very potent Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with dual cores, so any CPU utilization readings could be under half what one might see on a typical single-core home theater PC.
The AIW occupies a much larger slice of CPU time without hardware MPEG2 encoding acceleration, and those numbers in the high teens could start to look scary on a slower single-core CPU. Let’s see what happens when we layer on some playback. In this next test, we were watching TV after having paused the video feed for a few seconds. Accordingly, the system was encoding a video stream to disk while decoding and playing back the same stream after a few seconds’ delay.
This card can serve as a primary TV tuner for an MCE-based home theater system, but CPU utilization will be a real concern. This thing would be using up to 50% of CPU time on single-core processor. The frustrating part about seeing this kind of CPU utilization from the AIW X1900 is that it has a great big GPU sitting right there onboard that ought to be able to help out with MPEG2 encoding very effectively. Too bad ATI doesn’t take advantage of it.
Beyond the performance issues, the AIW does a fine job of tuning and playing television in Windows MCE and in ATI’s Multimedia Center. Subjectively, the image quality is probably about as good as one can expect from a standard-def TV signal. ATI’s scaling algorithm flatters NTSC television on a much higher definition computer monitor, hiding the jaggies without creating smeary artifacts. The AIW absolutely trounces our cheap Conexant card in terms of visual output. It’s simply no contest.
During the course of our testing, though, we ran into an apparent bug in ATI’s encoder for Media Center. We found that video would freeze up periodically while watching live TV, with the problem growing progressively worse over time. This problem did not occur during extended viewing in ATI’s Multimedia Center, and we were able to resolve the issue in Windows Media Center by swapping in a single-core Athlon 64 FX-57 processor. ATI may have some work to do on multithreading support in its encoder software.
The value proposition for the All-In-Wonder X1900 is quite good, all things considered. The card’s performance in 3D graphics matches up well against NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX, and the GTX is currently selling at online retailers for about $489. At $499 list, the AIW X1900 looks like a steal by comparison. The only reason I can think to buy the GTX instead is if you hope to upgrade in the future to a multi-GPU config; the GTX can do SLI, but the AIW X1900 can’t participate in the ATI’s CrossFire scheme. Beyond that, all of signs point to the All-In-Wonder X1900 as the smarter choice. Not only can the AIW pump out fluid 3D graphics and gaming at high resolutions for that price, but it also packs a TV tuner, all manner of video input and display options, a programmable RF remote control, and software to tie it all together. These extras and the video card would almost certainly cost more if they were purchased separately (although that’s a very theoretical argument until ATI delivers a less expensive version of the Radeon X1900.)
The AIW 1900 also moves the overall AIW concept ahead with the addition of ATI’s latest GPU, the incorporation of the Remote Wonder Plus with its superior button layout and Windows Media Center mappings, and the inclusion of Adobe’s Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements. All of these things represent progress for a product line that’s totally unique and has very little competition from NVIDIA or anyone else.
Yet I can’t escape the impression that the AIW X1900 isn’t all that it couldand shouldbe. ATI’s Multimedia Center is dreadful compared to Windows MCE or even Snapstream’s Beyond TV. The EazyLook interface desperately needs more work, especially more integration with the program guide, before any AIW product can bill itself as truly suitable for the living room. Even then, the AIW X1900 probably shouldn’t be pitched as an HTPC-type solution. With current games, this big, hot GPU is overkill for any common TV resolution except maybe 1080p, and its cooler makes too much noise for the living room. We might be willing to overlook those things if the AIW X1900 had hardware-assisted MPEG2 encoding, but it doesn’t. Add in the bugs we found in the Remote Wonder software and the Media Center encoder, and the AIW X1900 just doesn’t make sense outside of a more traditional desktop PC.
I mention these things in part because it’s a shame the AIW X1900 doesn’t better live up to its concept. If it were truly the key parts of a TiVo and Xbox 360 replacement in one package for $499, regular old video cards might go out of style.
Having said that, the AIW X1900 still has quite a bit of appeal for many folks. As the anchor for a dorm room PC, the AIW X1900 could be killer. For aspiring video editors and gamers, the AIW X1900 might be the perfect upgrade to a dreary Dell with underpowered graphics. And for an enthusiast’s do-it-all system, the AIW is simply a solid alternative to the GeForce 7800 GTX at about five hundred buckswith or without the extra bells and whistles.