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).

Re:Mmmhmm.

[HunterZ]

A couple years ago my former roommate purchased an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB AGP AiW for an XP Pro box he was assembling. We had problems with it from the get-go:
- First, the TV software for the AiW somehow muted the line in of the sound card while it was running no matter what we tried. We ended up working around it by running the sound outputs from the AiW tuner directly to his speakers (via a switchbox I think, so that he could switch back to using them for normal computer stuff)
- I tried talking to their support people on the phone about the issue, and the guy treated me like an idiot for not being able to get things working. For the record, I'm an embedded software engineer with a BSCS, and a life-long computer and video game geek who has been building his own computers from parts since my 120MHz 486.
- More recently (I'd say around a year ago), he was getting lag and stuttering when playing XBox/PS2/Gamecube games on the tuner. We reinstalled the latest drivers and supporting software to no avail. Eventually we found DScaler, which turned out to be a much better option (although it was harder to configure).
- As the parent poster mentioned, the card is quickly aging. Even if it weren't for the AGP-to-PCIe transition combined with the fact that my former roommate has two PCs (one for gaming, one for media and other projects), he would toss out what was originally a rather expensive card on his next upgrade.

As for nVidia cards, my first 3D accelerator was a 16MB AGP nVidia Riva TNT (yes, the first TNT). I bought it because I could read through the hype and see that 3dfx had reached its azimuth and was no longer innovating, plus of course the TNT already had much better OpenGL support (Direct3D wasn't quite as good at first though).

Now, however, I'm starting to get a bad taste in my mouth about nVidia over the last few years:
- product placements on game boxes and intro movies. They seem to be succumbing to the pitfall of relying on heavy marketing instead of product innovation and competitive pricing (i.e. they are more concerned about the pitch than the product)
- silently (at first) putting in application-specific driver optimizations for benchmarking software
- seems to still regularly leak betas to keep customers from screaming for more frequent driver releases (a tradition that was already in place by the time I had acquired my second 3D card, a Geforce2MX)

That said, I'm considering giving them another chance with my next system as I love their nForce2 motherboards and have had a few frustrating experiences with ATI.

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.

Time to wax nostalgic.

[jcr]

So, for $380 bucks, I can get a GPU card that exceed the computing power available to the NSA in the 1980s? Is that about right?

The video transcoding supports sounds very nice. If I can get hardware-assisted H.264 encoding, I'm all over that.

-jcr

Re:Time to wax nostalgic.

[imboboage0]

So, for $380 bucks, I can get a GPU card that exceed the computing power available to the NSA in the 1980s? Is that about right?

Negative. for 380 bucks, you can pay a psychic to tell you that it was a good idea you didn't waste your money on a GPU so you could brag about having more computing power than the NSA in the 1980s. =P

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.

Contraband!

[JakiChan]

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

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?

[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: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.

STILL no cable box support!

[mjphil]

A quick at the ATI site reveals they don't include any way to control a set top box. How about leaving off the "125 channel tuner" and adding a simple IR dongle?

$380 is for "budget" users?

[Stan Vassilev]

Excuse me this is a video card.
Since when a $380 video card is targeted to budget users? Maybe poor CEO's on a budget, but I mean come on.

I've the feeling people overstimate the importance of a video card in the overall PC experience. I have a what should be crap of the crappiest, got few years ago for less than 40 bucks: GeForce 4 MX.

Yet, it runs Quake 3 smooth at 1280x1024, Doom 3 ok in 800x600 and HalfLife just fine in 1024x768 for playback.

Also the 2D performance virtually doesn't matter anymore on any of the new videocards, them all being "fast enough that you won't notice any difference".

I'd never spend $380 on a video card. Plus I bet this will be rebranded and sold in the TRUE budget range around 40-50 USD just 3 of years from now.

Re:$380 is for "budget" users?

[Frumious Wombat]

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 only thing that matters is

[towsonu2003]

does it run linux?!

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...

Voodoo 5500 AGP

[TubeSteak]

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

linux support

[asv108]

I really wish some hardware sites would start doing a section on every hardware review about the status of linux support. It might encourage hardware manufactures to consider making at least a semi-decent attempt to support Linux.

Right now, most of the major sites seem to focus solely on windows drivers and windows specific features. I realize that its 95% windows world, but Linux people do purchase a decent amount of hardware. Because of Nvidia's decent Linux support over the years, when I look at graphics cards I don't even bother looking to see what ATI has to offer.

It there's a proprietary driver, no specs

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

ATI and NVidia are famous for being the two worst companies to buy from. Some links:

• The Linux Doomsday scenario
• The "Everbody loves Eric Raymond" cartoon strip it inspired ;-) - featuring ATI
• Stallman makes an example of NVidia in the GNU 20th anniversary essay

Names & ATI Support

[ScottCooperDotNet]

A few things:

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.

Re:Names & ATI Support

[cornface]

You're right, that makes perfect sense.

IF you are a freakish loser.

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.

Is this a North America specific card?

[SenorCitizen]

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.