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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."
And because it WILL happen..... =P
Had to get it out of the way for everyone. =D
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
Isn't the MPAA trying to make these things illegal?
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
I owned an nVidia "Personal Cinema" version back when they were calling it that...
It was essentially a GeForce 2MX with the TV Tuner / Video-In-Video-Out additions... At the time, it sucked horribly... couldn't record in *any* format without either chopping resolution to 352x240 OR dropping frames periodically... worse, though, the frame dropping would be in 5-10 frame spurts... get 250 consecutive frames, then lose the next 8...
This wasn't entirely the card's fault... but I had such troubles with the drivers getting the thing to work at all that I still blame the driver as the likely biggest factor...
It even supposedly had a hardware MPEG-1 encoder on the board... I never could get that to work...
A friend owned the very first All-In-Wonder Radeon. He loved it.
I've heard plenty of ATi users who have stories like my nVidia story, but I don't even know of anyone else who has an nVidia GPU + TV Tuner set... so take one pair of anecdotes for what they're worth...
Now, until recently, ATi drivers were total shit. I mean hell, my Radeon 8500LE was so bad I had to return it (BSOD within 15 minutes of launching any DirectX-based game. Usually the crash was in ati.sys, sometimes the driver just broke the Windows memory manager, and then I'd get BSODs in things like ntfs.sys. Returned the card, bought a GeForce 4, and my problems went away... (well, actually that's when my overheating problems began, but that's an altogether different problem).
However, I do really like my ATi X800XT. The driver no longer completely sucks. (I can still cause a BSOD from time to time -- but only if I have two or more DirectX games running simultaneously... since the BSOD is accompanied by really awful sounds from the speakers, I suspect that it involves a conflict of some sort between video and audio drivers, but I've dug nowhere near deeply enough to know if I'm right -- just a suspicion at this point...
Still using my Voodoo 5500 AGP.
It's a shame they had to close up shop and sell their IP to nVidia.
My other graphics card is an ATI 9700 Pro
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's an interesting question. A few years ago, I was buying $100 Matrox cards for OpenGL applications that we used to use SGI Solid Impact workstations for. A few years later, it was $100 Radeons, when I could get them with 64-128Mb of main memory. The only time we bought something more expensive was when we wanted to drive a stereo-wall, without syncing together two separate machines. (we'd done that, with a pair of Ultra-60s, and didn't want the headache of doing it with Windows).
$100 is a good price point; still good performance, but out long enough for the drivers to be stable and most of the glaring bugs gone. I suspect that the card used to matter more, because a few years back displays started getting better rapidly, while falling in price, so suddenly the average user (i.e. the one buying the $1k - $800 machine) could afford a 1280x1024 monitor. The stock video cards that shipped by default circa 1998 had trouble running one of those without flickering. Now, the performance-limiting component seems to be core memory, and occasionally the harddrive.
Of course, most PC parts are wildly overpowered/priced for the average user, except the one that matters; the Power Supply. That seems to be underspeced, and where people try to save money.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
ATI and NVidia are famous for being the two worst companies to buy from. Some links:
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
It would be nice if ATI kept the naming of the products/chips in some sort of easily understandable order. nVidia has it right, 66xx, 78xx, etc. It matches up with the GeForce n number system to some degree. ATI X1800, what is that? How does it compare with a Radeon 9600?
It seems we're getting into an IE vs Netscape numbering race.
My brother's ATI Built card is messing up, and it's under warranty, or at least I think it is, but every time I fill out the long form on ATI's site I get an email days later "invalid serial number." So I've filled it out twice now, but ATI doesn't offer a simple human email response from support@ati.com.
ATI is also requiring each card purchased to be registered for warranty service within 30 days of purchase. No thanks, I paid for it, that's my registration. Last time I checked ATI had a 5 year warranty which is great, they were prompt with my card. (nVidia doesn't make retail cards so it's all 3rd party support; eVGA, Jaton, etc.)
I don't want this to sound like an nVidia fanboi post, but ATI has lost me as a customer until they pull their heads out of the sand. Until then, I'll enjoy downloading a single driver file from nVidia that works with almost every chip they make.
I mean come on, editors/submitters. You could at least include a line in the blurb that would say *where* the card is sold - you know, different TV standards/digital TV formats/HDTV/connectors used around the world and all?
My guess would be that there won't be a DVB-T/C model of the card with 1024x576i RGB SCART output any time soon, although it would be sweet. No, we don't have HDTV over here.