ATI X1900 All-in-Wonder

The All-in-Wonder functionality

Although the featureset of this board is the same as on previous generations of AIW cards, let's take a second just to recap:

• DVB-T TV tuner for digital reception
  
• Radio tuner for FM reception
  
• Dedicated ATI software - MultiMedia Center - for watching and recording TV
  
• Windows Media Center Edition support

What's the signal process for this card? As Tim pointed out previously, "The DVB and analogue tuning is handled by the MT2121 tuner located underneath the gold ATI Tuner shell located in the top left corner of the video card. It feeds the Theater 200 chip with a decoded AV stream from the TV and Radio connections while the NxtWave NXT6000 performs demodulation, along with some filtering and error correction for the MT2121 tuner."

DVB-T tuner: In the UK, you can now pick up over 60 channels on Freeview, with better signal quality than over analogue. There is only a single tuner: if you want the dual tuner functionality on MCE, you'll need to buy a second Theater 200 tuner card. You can take a look at our evaluation of the TV quality.

MultiMedia Center: The software has a lot of cool features that you can't get elsewhere. You can set a TV programme to be your wallpaper, for example. Check out our previous look at MMC's functions.

Connections

If you want to connect up your X1900 AIW to a display, you'll want a bundle of different options. If you have a High Definition LCD display, chances are you'll use either the VGA or DVI connection on the back of the card, much as with a normal monitor. If you're using a non-HD set, you can use Component, S-Video or Composite via the external breakout box.

Avivo

New to the X1000-series ATI cards is its Avivo technology. We covered it in some depth back in December. Avivo adds a couple of key multimedia features to the X1900 AIW:

Media transcoding: Using the included ATI Video Converter software, you can easily convert one video format to another quickly. This is great for moving content between various devices such as your PC and iPod or PSP.

H.264 decoding: ATI is now handling the decoding of H.264 content in the GPU hardware itself. Why is this important? Because even the fastest CPUs today can't handle 1080p, high-resolution content encoded in this format. With the help of Avivo, you'll be able to grab the latest Apple and Windows Media high-res content and watch it at full screen on your funky 30" Dell or Apple display. If you're lucky enough to own one, that is.

We strongly advise you take a look at our Avivo article - it will explain this in full.