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

Mmmhmm.

[imboboage0]

I am an nvidia guy. I've always liked them over ATi, mainly because of driver support (...but does it run linux? =P) However, I have seen a lack of an AiW type of thing here on this side of the fence. Don't get me wrong, I love my 6600GT. It was an excellent choice for a budget gaming card. However, I am sure many people (HTPC builders, casual users using it for video, etc.) like the AiW very much. It has always seemed to be a great concept that sold well. This time however, ATi took it a step further. They have introduced this AiW series on the budget end of things. This was a VERY smart business move and I predict it will be taken well by the community as a whole.

And because it WILL happen..... =P

• [INSERT FANBOY NVIDIA/ATI RANT HERE]
  • 
    
    Had to get it out of the way for everyone. =D

Re:Mmmhmm.

[Ark42]

I've owned a few All-in-Wonders and I can say first-hand that support is horrible. The first All-in-Wonder was never supported under Windows 2000 or higher as anything other then a basic video card. Forget watching TV unless you want to downgrade to Windows ME or lower! The card wasn't even that old when Windows 2000 came out either. When you are using them on the right OS and with the newest drivers, they still tend to crash quite a bit, even the new Radeon All-in-Wonders under XP are quite unreliable. I also have an original Rage II+ and a Rage 128Pro All-in-Wonder, and don't care for any of them.

The worst of it is, you can't upgrade to a better 3D card without re-buying the TV tuner features again and again, since if you use them as a secondary card (PCI versions) the TV features don't work! I tend to upgrade my video card and CPU a lot more often than I need to upgrade me TV-in ability. I've since switched to stand-alone generic PCI tuner cards, which work much better, and don't get in the way of upgrading my main AGP or PCI-express video card when I need to play newer 3D games.

I've also used nVidia cards since the TNT2, and the drivers have *always* been great. I've never had a single bit of trouble with any nVidia card or driver, and I've gone through 5 iterations of GeForce cards on top of the TNT2 now.

Re:Mmmhmm.

[Sancho]

The worst of it is, you can't upgrade to a better 3D card without re-buying the TV tuner features again and again, since if you use them as a secondary card (PCI versions) the TV features don't work! I tend to upgrade my video card and CPU a lot more often than I need to upgrade me TV-in ability. I've since switched to stand-alone generic PCI tuner cards, which work much better, and don't get in the way of upgrading my main AGP or PCI-express video card when I need to play newer 3D games.

This is the best point I've ever seen anyone make against the AiW series (or any combined 3D/Capture card, for that matter). Considering that the AiW version of the card can apparently cost over $100 more than the base card, it's definitely something to consider, even without the added headache of the drivers (I had a 9600 AiW running on Win2k for awhile--every reinstall, you had to install the drivers in a very specific order or you didn't show TV on the machine).

Contraband!

[JakiChan]

Isn't the MPAA trying to make these things illegal?

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

[Fareq]

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...