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ATI's All-In-Wonder 2006

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the pretty-pictures dept.

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."

13 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Mmmhmm. by imboboage0 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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
    --
    Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
    1. Re:Mmmhmm. by Ark42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Morphing Software
    2. Re:Mmmhmm. by Sancho · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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).

  2. Time to wax nostalgic. by jcr · · Score: 3, Funny

    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

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  3. Contraband! by JakiChan · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    "Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
    1. Re:Contraband! by neochubbz · · Score: 4, Informative



      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/

      --
      Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one. -Arthur Dent
  4. Re:so what's nvidia's equivalent of this thing? by Ark42 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    Morphing Software
  5. Re:Why PCI? by fwc · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

  6. STILL no cable box support! by mjphil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  7. $380 is for "budget" users? by Stan+Vassilev · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:so what's nvidia's equivalent of this thing? by Fareq · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

  9. linux support by asv108 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.

  10. Reading Comprehension by rsmith-mac · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.