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: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.

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.