ATI's All-In-Wonder 2006

Anonymous writes "AnandTech's Josh Venning takes a first look at ATI's brand new All-In-Wonder 2006 PCIe video card. Due to hit retail stores sometime this week, the A-I-W 2006 is based on the X1300 series of cards, making it aimed at more budget-based users. AnandTech also compared the A-I-W 2006 to the X1300 Pro to get an idea of where this version of the X1300 line of cards stands."

Comments

Re:Why PCI?

[Durinthal]

Uh.. notice the little "e" next to PCI in the article and summary? That means it's PCI Express, which is better than AGP and where all high-end graphics cards are going now.

Re:Why PCI?

[Dual_View]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

Well, somebody had to explain it to me too, at one point. Still, I find it hard to believe you hadn't at least HEARD of it. Graphics cards that use ordinary PCI interfaces are a joke so old it isn't even funny anymore.

Re:so what's nvidia's equivalent of this thing?

[Ark42]

The closest thing I've seen with nVidia is those ASUS cards with tuner functionality slapped on, but ASUS's driver quality is no where near as good as nVidia's driver quality, so you are likely much better off getting a plain nVidia card which can be indepentantly upgraded, and pairing it with a generic PCI TV tuner card.

Re:Contraband!

[neochubbz]

Actually, the MPAA is trying to make the cards not capable of recording copyrighted material by "flagging" copyrighted shows. The dreaded "broadcast flag" would make the card not able to record any "flagged" material. Or something like that... You can read all about it at the EFF website.

http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/

Re:Why PCI?

[fwc]

I think you missed the 'e' on the original post. PCI Express. 8x AGP is the end of the road for AGP. 8x AGP is capable of a total of about 2GB/s.

PCI express uses the concept of a "lane". Each lane is capable of 250MB/s in each direction at the same time, for a total of 500MB/s. A x1 PCIe card has 1 lane, and a x2 has two, and so on. I think the video card mentioned above is a x16 card, capable of 16 lanes, or 4GB/s in each direction, or 8GB/s total. I believe the spec for 32 lanes is also already set.

The cool thing about pcie is that it can be used for not only video but for everything else. Plus each lane isn't shared across the slots. So you have 8GB/s for your video card, and 500MB/s for your Gigabit (100MB/s) ethernet card, and another 8GB/s for a SANS disk array interface card, and so on.

Re:Mmmhmm.

[Pxtl]

AiW linux support is even worse than normal ATI linux support - the AIWs use some completely orthogonal approach that means they don't work at all like a normal capture board - as such, nobody supports their capture abilities at all.

Re:Mmmhmm.

[enrico_suave]

Although I strongly suggest to anyone rolling their own PVR to get a dedicated standalone hardware encoding tuner card... The previous poster could get some more mileage out of his 9600AIW with better 3rd party PVR software like BeyondTV.

You might also try Media Portal (and open source windows alternative that's based/forked from the XBox Media Center project)

e.

Re:so what's nvidia's equivalent of this thing?

[Ark42]

That is a good point that is only recently an option with USB 2 (Hi-Speed 480Mbps) since "Full Speed" 12Mbps could never carry a full resolution, full framerate TV stream. It would be very important to verify that you truely have Hi-Speed USB 2.0 ports available before buying such a device, but with a new system build, it would be very likely that you would now.

Reading Comprehension

[rsmith-mac]

If you guys actually bothered to fully read the article, it's the X1800XL AIW that's going for $380. The AIW 2006(aka the X1300 AIW) has a MSRP of $199 and will likely go for less.