ATI X1900 All-in-Wonder

Performance

We'll be bringing you a full set of real-world benchmarks in our usual style next week when we upload our X1900 group test article - we currently have a mountain of different retail boards of various designations in the labs, and we're punishing them pretty hard. For now, we thought we'd give you our initial impressions of performance.

One of the characteristics of the X1900 series, we found, was the ability to play at simply ridiculous resolutions. The X1900XTX can handle F.E.A.R. at 2048x1536 with no eye candy or at 1600x1200 with all the effects. Not so on this card. The 256MB of memory onboard limits the resolution, and we found that 1600x1200 with no eye candy was an appropriate level to play at, or even going down to 1280x1024 with AA and AF on. Far Cry and Half-Life 2 were also both happiest at 1600x1200 with reduced details, whereas we could crank up the resolution and details on the X1900XTX. Our impression is that this card is a little slower than a 7800 GTX 256MB in the real world.

We were rather hoping to be able to really push this baby and overclock it right up, given the relatively conservative clock speeds. We were a little disappointed here - we managed an extra 75MHz out of the core, but the memory would only budge by a few MHz, meaning that there wasn't much performance difference.

Discussion

The All-in-Wonder is an interesting product in a swiftly evolving marketplace. Right now, the multimedia industry is moving incredibly fast along a lot of different vectors: Microsoft is doing one thing, Intel's off elsewhere, Apple's doing something else, NVIDIA's doing its own thing, and there's not much for them to unite behind. ATI also has its own thing - the AIW. It's worth investigating how it sits in the overall ecosystem for video right now, and that is perhaps achieved easiest by weighing up the pros and cons of buying this board.

Pros: The X1900 All-in-Wonder is a very fast board for gaming, no doubt about it. If you have a nice HDTV and you really want to do some living room gaming on it, this board is an obvious choice. It allows you to combine video functionality with way-more-than-adequate video performance. Regardless of the video extras, it's a pretty good value gaming card: at £300 for GTX performance, it's pretty good value.

ATI has undoubtedly got some nifty stuff with its software bundle. The Avivo software is pretty kick-ass, with video transcoding that no-one can touch. If you're serious about your media and its portability, you will really appreciate this. H.264 decoding is undoubtedly a cool thing too, allowing you to get some decent framerates from top-whack content. Not only does ATI have great bundled software, it's also compatible with Media Center too: meaning you can get all the great benefits of the Microsoft software, which we have previously covered in some depth.

The X1900 All-in-Wonder also makes for a great little workhorse rig, as Tim has previously pointed out. Many people like to use a small form factor rig to work on, and the AIW slots in there perfectly. It allows you to have a rig that's pretty quiet, that you can watch the news and listen to the radio on, and that also has enough oomph for you to fire up Counter-Strike for a lunchtime game in the office.

The connectivity on the rear of the card is awesome: you'll not lack for a way to hook this up to a big screen.

We could argue that this is a great gaming board, at a great price, with some great multimedia kit too.


Cons: The AIW is an oddity in a changing market. Brand new systems suitable for home theatre use are all going to be branded up with Intel's Viiv scheme with Media Center software, and Viiv PCs broadly fall into two form factors. One is the almost-ATX chunky box, and the other is the incredibly small shoebox. The AIW doesn't fit neatly into either of these two form factors, and here's why. In a shoebox system, there's no room for even one expansion card: everything is on board.

In these scenarios, we're looking at Intel or ATI integrated graphics on the motherboard and no hope of any serious gaming. In the chunky box system, there's plenty of room for expansion: so why not have dual digital tuners? You don't have to have everything on one card in these systems, you can go ahead and have a mid-range gaming card and a couple of digital tuners no worries. This provides you with enough gaming performance and with the added benefit of being able to record one channel and watch another.

If we could get a dual DVB-T AIW, then that really would be something. We've been promised it, but it's not emerged yet. In a market where dual tuners are swifty becoming standard, it looks like something of a Half-in-Wonder.

ATI has a great software suite in its MultiMedia Center. How many people are really going to use it though? If you're running a home theatre PC in your living room, you're going to be using Media Center, why use anything else? Aren't most people simply not using all this stuff?

There's also the connectivity issue. ATI provides all sorts of gubbins for connecting to every TV possible. As we move forward, everyone is going to connect via DVI or VGA, both of which are available on normal cards. If you're using an older TV, chances are you'll want component - and the X1000 series cards all support component output via a standard VIVO port. Is there really much need for all this added bumph?



Of course, the one connection standard that you really are going to want isn't there. ATI still hasn't integrated HDCP on to this board: meaning its not going to be compatible with next-generation HD optical content. You're left with buying a £300 board for your video machine that won't support the upcoming optical formats. Why not buy something cheaper for now and something with HDCP later?

ATI bundles a remote with this thing. If you're building it into a MCE PC, you'll just use the MCE remote. If you're sitting at your desktop, you won't need one, making it redundant.

Conclusions

It's hard to escape the conclusion that the X1900 All-in-Wonder is a great product. It has great gaming performance for the price, as well as added multimedia functionality. This is a good thing.

However, there's also no escaping the fact that all ATI has done here is to whack its standard AIW functionality on top of a faster board. What ATI really needs to do is to go away and really think about its place in the broader scheme of things. The industry is beginning to unite behind Media Center and Viiv: it needs to create a software suite that allows all of the cool Windows functionality it currently has to be accessible via MCE, using the MCE remote.

It needs to get two tuners on a single card, making it a great prospect for our small form factor systems - even if that means compromising a little gaming performance. More than anything else, it needs to get HDCP on its board - spending £300 on a non-HDCP board for video use, as HD-DVD prepares to launch in 3 months, is hard to justify.