It's been a long, long time since we last saw a high-end All-In-Wonder card from ATI. In fact it's been well over a year and a half since we've seen a high-end 3D card saddled with the All-In-Wonder moniker. There have been new releases in the All-In-Wonder line of course, but if you were looking for that card that really puts the "All" in All-In-Wonder, the best you could get was the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro.

For awhile there it was beginning to look like the AIW 9800 Pro was the fastest AGP based AIW we would be getting, but then in September ATI surprised everyone and unveiled the All-In-Wonder X800XT. Of course, as everyone learned with the X800 and X700 launches, product announcements and product delivery are two completely different things. Some very tough design challenges pushed the AIW X800XT back, then back again, and before you knew it the All-In-Wonder X800XT launch was starting to look like the X800XT Platinum and X700XT all over again.

Thankfully, ATI managed to pull it off, and to the surprise of many folks the purple and gold All-In-Wonder X800XT actually started showing up in retail a few months ago.

Bundle

First we'll get the bundle out of the way. ATI always goes pretty crazy with their All-In-Wonder bundles, particularly for their high-end offerings, and the All-In-Wonder X800XT continues that trend. Here's a complete breakdown:

• All-In-Wonder X800XT
• Remote Wonder II with USB receiver pod (batteries included)
• Audio/Video input block
• S-video/composite video output block
• Component video output block
• S-video cable
• Composite cable
• VIVO dongle
• FM radio antenna
• Power adapter cable
• Software
• Driver CD
• Catalyst Drivers
• Multimedia Center
• ATI DVD Player
• Hydravision
• Visual Communicator
• Matchware Mediator 7
• Pinnacle Studio 9, ATI version
• User manual
• Quick start install guide

The launch of the All-In-Wonder X800XT hints at how long it takes to develop these "all in one" cards by the fact that it uses ATI's AGP R420 chipset. Announced last Spring, the R420 has since been superseded by ATI's R430, R480, and R481 (a native AGP version of the R480) graphics cores. It's no longer the fastest of ATI's current 3D graphics card lineup, but with 16 pixel pipelines, a 256-bit memory bus, and 256MB of 1.6ns GDDR3 memory, it's still one of the fastest 3D cards available on the market. Either way you look at it, it's a whole hell of a lot faster than the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro it has replaced!

All-In-Wonder X800XT Front	Front with heatsink removed	All-In-Wonder X800XT rear
Single-slot cooling unit	Floppy style power connection	AIW X800XT vs AIW 9800 Pro

As you can see, the All-In-Wonder X800XT is a relatively short single-height card, which is quite a feat of engineering considering how many features are packed on there and the speed of the card. It requires an external power source like other X800-class AGP cards, but uses the smaller floppy style power connector and not the large 4-pin Molex (the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro differed from it's non-AIW counterpart in that way as well).

See below for the technical specs on the AIW X800XT along with the specs for each of the other cards I've used for performance comparisons in this review.

Specifications
	AIW X800XT	X800XT	AIW 9800 Pro	X850XT Platinum
Core	R420	R420	R350	R481
Silicon Process	130nm low-k	130nm low-k	150nm	130nm low-k
Transistor Count (millions)	160	160	110	160
Core Speed MHz	500	500	380	540
Memory Speed MHz	500 GDDR3	500 GDDR3	340 DDR	590 GDDR3
Bus Standard	AGP 8x	AGP 8x	AGP 8x	AGP 8x
Bus Width	256bit	256bit	256bit	256bit
Pixel Pipelines	16	16	8	16
Peak Memory Bandwidth (GB/s)	32.0	32.0	21.8	37.8
Pixel Fillrate (million pixels/sec)	8,000	8,000	3,040	8,640
Texel Fillrate (million texels/sec)	8,000	8,000	3,040	8,640
MSRP ($US)	$449	-	$299	$549

Graphics Technology

• RADEON® X800 XT Visual processor unit (GPU)

Memory Configuration

• 256MB of double data rate GDDR3 memory

Operating Systems Support

• Windows® XP (Home and Professional)
• Windows® 2000

Display Support

• VGA connector for analog CRT
• S-video or composite connector for TV/VCR
• DVI-I connector for digital CRT or flat panel
• Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
• YPrPb output adapter included which enables output to HDTV-ready televisions (North America only)

TV Tuner Requirements
TV signal from amplified antenna or cable. Version included for:

• NTSC (North America, Japan, and Latin America*)
• MulTView™ requires additional ATI PCI TV WONDER™ card, compatible motherboard and soundcard
  
  *Features vary from country to country and depending on the television standard. Note that Latin American countries using the PAL M and PAL N standards including Argentina and Brazil are supported by the NTSC version.

New and Uniquely Designed Connectors
These innovative modular input and output blocks are completely flexible and can be joined together to allow users to place the input and output connections in a variety of easily accessible combinations.

• DVI-I
• 15 pin VGA
• Stereo audio, S-video, and composite video inputs and outputs
• External stereo connections to sound card’s line input and output Dolby® digital stereo audio output (S/PDIF)
• YPrPb Output

The All-In-Wonder X800XT shares many of the same feature improvements that ATI refined on the All-In-Wonder X600 Pro. I'll outline some of these improvements below.

Dual Display Support

Because of obvious space constraints on the back panel, the previous high-end AIW 9800 Pro didn't offer any form of dual-display support. The first AIW to support it was the AIW 9600 Pro which provided the feature via an output dongle, however, the problem with it was that it only offered standard VGA ports, there was no DVI port on the card at all.

The new AIW X800XT also offers dual-display support -- standard VGA with DVI -- and puts both ports right on the back of the card. ATI was able to free up room on the back panel by moving all the VIVO ports to a separate dongle which connects to the card via a small rectangular port, similar in size to a Firewire port.

FM-Radio

Not only has the new arrangement afforded the use of dual-displays with DVI, but the FM radio tuning capability of the previous mid-range All-In-Wonder cards has also been included. A small flexible antenna is included in the bundle to allow you to take advantage of the FM tuner.

Digital TV-Tuner

Older All-In-Wonder cards used an analog tuner made by Phillips that was housed in a large metal "can" that took up a sizeable chunk of the cards surface area. The new AIW X800XT uses the new digital tuner which ATI first used on their All-In-Wonder X600 and then again on their TV Wonder Elite standalone TV tuner card. The tuner in question is developed by Microtune and is a mere fraction of the size of the old analog tuner.

One of the big problems people were having with the AIW X800XT when it first appeared was the noticeable lag when changing channels. However, with the new Catalyst 5.4 drivers, this lag has been greatly reduced so that channel changing speed is now roughly on par with the very fast Phillips analog tuner found on the AIW 9800 Pro.

Domino Blocks

Also improved over the older generation of All-In-Wonder cards are the VIVO connectors. The new connections are housed in convenient blocks that can be "stuck" to one another, sort of like Lego bricks, which can help in organizing the inevitable wire mess. Their resemblance to dominos never went unnoticed by users and has caught on so that now even ATI often refers to them as such.

The domino blocks connect to the All-In-Wonder using the VIVO dongle I mentioned above. This dongle also contains the CATV and Antenna/FM tuner ports along with the 2 VIVO ports.

The dominos offer the same basic features as the older dongles: s-video and composite-in with stereo left and right audio in (pic), with s-video and composite-out or component-out. You might have noticed that ATI took advantage of the space offered on the dominos to include RCA audio left and right output now as well. To take advantage of the RCA audio outs you have to connect the green speaker jack to your soundcard's digital line-out jack. Then, whatever sounds your computer outputs gets passed through to the RCA jacks as well. The green jack has a pass-through connector on it so that you can plug in your computer speakers at the same time as well. The setup works nicely and makes using the AIW X80XT in a Home Theater environment real easy.

Theater 200

As much as some areas have changed and improved, other areas have however remained the same. One of these areas, and possibly the most significant, is the multimedia processor. ATI decided to stick to their older Theater 200 even though they had already developed a new, much more powerful multimedia processor known as the Theater 550 Pro. The Theater 200 is a good chip and has some good video processing capabilities, but it's getting a bit long in the tooth now. Its first appearance was on the All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro back in the Fall of 2002, and it's been used by ATI in all their All-In-Wonder products since then.

The reason why ATI never used the more technologically advanced Theater 550 Pro on the AIW X800XT is because the Theater 550 Pro was designed from the ground-up to only be used on stand-alone cards (such as the TV Wonder Elite). Therefore it doesn't have the video-in/out port that All-In-Wonder cards require. It's possible that ATI might update the Theater 550 Pro so that it can work with the All-In-Wonder cards, but as of this writing they have not officially announced anything to that effect.

The All-In-Wonder X800XT also comes with a very good remote control called the Remote Wonder II, the same remote that comes with the AIW 9600 series cards and the AIW X600. Even though it's not their newest remote control (there's a newer, smaller remote called the Remote Wonder Plus that comes with the TV Wonder Elite) the RWII still has the most features and, for me at least, is also the most comfortable.

Unlike traditional remote controls that use infrared to send signals, all of ATI's Remote Wonder remotes use Radio Frequencies. The advantage of RF over IR is that RF signals can go through walls and ceilings so you can control your All-In-Wonder from a separate room in your house if you wish to. Range is good and in the case of the RWII is good for distances of up to 60 feet. The only real disadvantage is that you can't control other devices such as set-top boxes with it and you can't program its functions onto a universal remote, so you always have to have the RWII on hand.

The Remote Wonder II sends its signals to a receiver "pod" which connects to your PC via a USB connection (whose cable is still too short). The pod itself is about the size and shape of an average bagel (sans hole) and has a short solid antenna offset to the side. Inside the pod behind the semi-transparent black plastic housing is a red LED which flashes as the receiver receives RF signals from the remote, giving you some feedback that the device is working

On the side of the pod is a 1/8" port that, as the story goes, ATI had intentions to use as a connection for an IR blaster device. With an IR blaster ATI could address one of the significant shortcomings of the Remote Wonder II which is its inability to control set-top box devices. Unfortunately, ATI has put that project on the backburner for the foreseeable future and has been focusing on higher priority projects. Hopefully at some point down the road we'll see it.

To test capture quality I connected the All-In-Wonder to my Bell ExpressVu 3100 digital satellite receiver using the s-video connection and used FRAPS to grab screenshots from MMC.

For the 3D Performance tests, Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropy were applied in the game where the options existed. For games that did not support those options natively, the graphics card control panel was used. V-Sync was also forced off for each test via the graphics card control panel. Otherwise all other graphics card control panel settings were left to their default values.

Batch files were used when possible for automated benchmarking. Manual benchmarking was done using FRAPS 2.5.4.

Benchmarking was done with Windows set to the "Adjust for best performance" profile, and all unnecessary Windows services and hardware devices were disabled. The latest drivers for each necessary hardware component were installed prior to testing and kept consistent throughout. Desktop resolution was 1280x960 with 32bit colour.

Test System Specs

• CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3500+, 2.2GHz (Newcastle core)
• Motherboard: ABIT AV8-3rd Eye, VIA K8T800 Pro, BIOS version 19
• Videocards (See the specifications page for details)
• All-In-Wonder X800XT
• Radeon X800XT
• All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro
• Radeon X8500XT Platinum Edition
• Drivers & Software
• Catalyst 5.4 WHQL
• MultiMedia Center 9.06.1
• Memory: 1GB (2x512MB) OCZ DDR PC-4200 Platinum Edition @ 400MHz/2-2-2-5 1T
• HDD: 120GB Seagate Barracuda V SATA, 7200rpm
• Sound: Onboard
• PSU: Enermax EG365P-VE 350W
• Case: SilverStone LC13 HTPC case
• OS: Windows XP Pro SP2

Testing was done on a fully assembled HTPC system.

Benchmark Software

Since this is a review of the All-In-Wonder which has much more to offer than 3D performance, I'm only going to check to make sure that it's up to snuff in regards to 3D performance and not run our full suite of benchmark tests.

This review marks the introduction of the excellent Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory game to our benchmark suite.

• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, v1.02 (DirectX)
• Half-Life 2, Source Engine 7 (DirectX)
• Doom3, v1.1 (OpenGL)

CPU Utilization

TV viewing, video capture/recording, and DVD playback are the three key areas that ATI has specifically designed the All-In-Wonder for so it are these features that I'll test first. I used ATI's default settings in each area which generally offer a balance of low CPU utilization and good image quality.

I tested the various TV viewing areas while watching World Cup Hockey on my Bell ExpressVU digital satellite system so with regard to content it was fairly consistent throughout.

I further tested TV-On-Demand by recording for a few minutes, then pausing, rewinding, and skipping ahead repeatedly. I noticed that after a few minutes of jumping around like this, video and audio would go out of sync rather significantly on both cards. Skipping ahead to "Live TV" would put it back in sync however. Unsurprisingly CPU Utilization went up rather significantly on both cards with TV-On-Demand enabled as well, though not to a point where it would become an immediate problem under most circumstances.

[ AIW X800XT ] [ AIW 9800 Pro ]

[ AIW X800XT ] [ AIW 9800 Pro ]

To test the recording capabilities I recorded a few minutes of the same World Cup Hockey game on both cards. The sequences I recorded on the AIW X800XT and AIW 9800 Pro aren't exactly the same of course, but I did manage to get both clips to record pretty much the same type of action.

To test video playback performance I ran the World Cup of Hockey recording I recorded for the recording test. The sequence looked as good as regular TV viewing (which is very good on digital satellite) and was in perfect sync.

[ AIW X800XT ] [ AIW 9800 Pro ]

[ AIW X800XT ] [ AIW 9800 Pro ]

Finally, DVD playback is very important to most All-In-Wonder users. I tested performance using the movie "I,Robot" and ATI's latest DVD decoder downloaded from their website. DVD performance on both cards is excellent.

[ AIW X800XT ] [ AIW 9800 Pro ]

TV Capture Quality

To compare capture quality between the AIW X800XT and AIW 9800 Pro I tuned to the CNN News channel. The news at the time of day I was testing the cards repeats over and over every half hour, so it made for an easy way to get comparable shots between teh two All-In-Wonder cards.

I used ATI's built in screen grab feature within EasyLook with "High Resolution Stills" enabled.

The grabs aren't from the exact same position, but they are close enough to show that the All-In-Wonder X800XT and All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro offer the same TV viewing quality, even though they use completely different tuner hardware.

Here are more image quality examples I grabbed while testing the All-In-Wonder X800XT, including the obligatory screenshot from The Simpsons...

DVD Playback Quality

ATI has always been known for excellent DVD performance and quality. Even back in the dark ages when ATI wasn't considered a competitive 3D performance company, ATI fans would always say "At least they have the best DVD quality".

Considering both cards use the same Theater 200 multimedia processor, it's unsurprising that they perform pretty much on par with each other with regard to CPU utilization and Image Quality.

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

I benchmarked Splinter Cell Chaos Theory using the benchmarking batch file that comes with the game. Anti-aliasing, anisotropy, and resolution were set within the game. All other settings remained the same.

The location of the batch file is <game dir>\System\Timedemo.bat. Each result is appended to the <game dir>\System\TimeDemoResults.xls file.

The Splinter Cell Chaos theory results are below. Click the text links at the top of the chart to change settings.

Half-Life 2

Testing of Half-Life 2 was done using AnandTech's five recently released Source Engine 7 timedemos (which are available on this page). I ran each timedemo for each resolution and AA/AF setting used in the charts below, and then averaged the results to get the final score. Anti-aliasing and Anisotropy were set on the command line.

A batch file was used to automate testing; the command line is below for reference. This batch file was used for each card that was tested. The settings surrounded by < > change for each pass:

The Half-Life 2 results are below. Click the text links at the top of the chart to change settings.

Doom 3

Doom3 was tested using the built in timedemo, demo1.demo. I benchmarked the default "High Quality" mode, which sets Anisotropy to 8x, and then combinations of Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropy over the resolutions shown in the chart below. Anti-aliasing and Anisotropy were set on the command line.

Another batch file was used to automate Doom3 testing as well. The command line is below for reference. This batch file was used for each card that was tested. The settings surrounded by < > change for each pass:

The Doom3 results are below. Click the text links at the top of the chart to change settings.

The AIW X800XT and X800XT are perfectly in line with each other, as expected. Also as expected, the AIW 9800 Pro lags signifigantly behind, especially so when using Anti-Aliasing. What is a bit surprising is how well the X800XT compares to the X850XT Platinum which only maintains a 5-10% performance lead for most tests.

While the All-In-Wonder X800XT doesn't offer anything really new over previous All-In-Wonder cards as far as multimedia features go, it doesn't have any of the short-comings of the All-In-Wonder cards that came before it either. In fact, I consider All-In-Wonder X800XT an amalgamation of all the good bits of previous All-In-Wonder cards without any of their obvious shortcomings. It features dual-display support with DVI, excellent 3D performance that is at least 2 to 3 times faster than the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro (rivaling that of the fastest 3D cards on the market), is small enough to fit in a HTPC or SFF case, and with the new RCA audio out jacks it's extremely easy to connect to a Home Theater system.

There will be other, more affordable variations of the All-In-Wonder X800. ATI has already announced an X800XL version which will feature a 400MHz core clock and 500Mhz memory that should be out soon, and there will also likely be X800 and maybe an X800SE version as well. The only thing that hasn't been mentioned so far is a PCI-Express version. If what I'm hearing is true, then these will be the last All-In-Wonder's on the AGP bus. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your point of view, but there are some very interesting things that ATI can do with the additional bandwidth provided by the PCI-Express bus.

Obviously delays like ATI has been forced to work through over the last year are unacceptable. A company doesn't make money by not shipping product, and it can't build on a loyal user base by failing to live up to their promises. The All-In-Wonder X800XT was beginning to look like it was never going to appear and users were starting to grumble loudly. ATI decided to face the wrath of those users however and delayed the part long enough so that they could get it right. After looking at the card it seems to have been the right move; the All-In-Wonder X800XT is closer to perfection than any All-In-Wonder has ever been before it.

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Plus

• Very fast
• Quiet
• Excellent features list
• Nice bundle
• Not too expensive considering the speed and features
• Dual-display with DVI
• RCA audio outs
• Convenient stackable output blocks
• Compact single-slot design

Minus

• Some niggling, minor issues with ATI's MultiMedia Center