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2006

Remote Wonder™ PLUS remote control

By IAN JOHNSON Saturday Mar 4, 2006
Globe and Mail
Reviewed on: Pentium D840 dual-core chip, Intel motherboard, 2GB of 667 MHz memory, SATA II 300 hard drive for video capture, SATA 150 hard drives for video storage, Windows XP Professional.

REVIEW:

ATI's new All-In-Wonder X1800 XL is a much bigger, much badder version of the AIW X800 XL.

And when I say bigger, I don't just mean in the full-featured sense of the term. I mean physically bigger. It's the largest video card I've reviewed, topping even the venerable old dual-fan 3DFX Voodoo 5500 by a wide margin. In fact, it was about an inch longer than my Intel ATX motherboard, just barely clearing the power sockets and requiring the removal of a DVD-ROM from the adjacent drive bay to make room for it.

In other words, if you're planning an upgrade to the AIW X1800 XL, whip out your tape measure first and check the space inside your case before you plunk down the roughly $425 (U.S.) that this card was selling for at retail when this review was published.

You'll also need a PCI Express motherboard, and you should check the specs on your power supply. This card draws more power than the PCIe slot can supply, and has to be connected to one of the new PCIe power connectors to give it an extra jolt of juice. It's also designed for Microsoft's Windows XP, and you'll need at least a 3 GHz processor for smooth video editing and encoding.

So is this card worth all the pre-installation homework and the potential upgrades necessary to make it run? You betcha.

ATI's All-In-Wonder has traditionally been a line of compromise cards, combining a wealth of multimedia features with middle-of-the-road graphics performance — great for multimediaphiles and amateur video hobbyists who also want to play a few games on the side. The All-In-Wonder X1800 XL breaks new ground — ATI has combined cutting-edge multimedia recording, editing and playback features with cutting-edge graphics performance that matches the number-crunching power of its latest cards designed for hard-core gamers.

The Hardware

The AIW X1800 XL's video processor is a 500 MHz chip built to deliver speed while minimizing heat. Even so, it requires a special fan assembly that covers much of the card. The fan has an automatic controller that slows it when extra cooling isn't needed, but I found the fan tended to run flat-out much of the time, giving a faint but audible whine — a consideration if your goal is a silent PC.

The memory controller is a brand new design that minimizes latency for the card's 256 megabytes of GDDR3 super-fast memory. Other enhancements over the preceding generation of the AIW line include support for ultra-threaded Shader Model 3.0 technology for smoother video playback and better anti-aliasing, and support for Direct X 9 vertex and pixel shaders in hardware. It features a three-level hierarchical Z-buffer and lossless Z-buffer compression of up to 48:1.

The card also employs ATI's new Avivo system. It's a very complex set of embedded technologies designed to tweak and improve the clarity and colour of the images being displayed and smooth out video playback.

Explaining the details behind all the improvements could fill a book, but suffice it to say that images look great, whether in games or from a TV feed, and the

AIW X1800 XL is one extremely fast chunk of graphics hardware. The AIW X1800 XL model delivered a roughly 20 per cent to 35 per cent performance improvement over the preceeding All-In-Wonder X800 XL, depending on the task and benchmark tests used.

For those who like to see things in hard numbers, I built a machine with an Intel D830 dual-core chip and 2 gigabytes of 667 MHz memory to test the AIW X1800 XL. Then I ran the commonly available 3DMarkPro05 and PCMark05 tests from Futuremark Corp. (www.futuremark.com). 3DMarkPro05, which tests gaming performance, came up with an overall rating of 13,053 3DMarks for the system (higher being better). In comparison, the same machine scored a meagre 1,898 3Dmarks with the motherboard's built-in Intel graphics accelerator, and a more impressive 10,719 with an ATI AIW X800 XL installed.

On the PCMark05 tests (which rates the system's overall performance for gaming, media playback, encryption/decryption performance and other number-crunching tasks), the system running the stock Intel motherboard accelerator scored 1,150 PCMarks. With the AIW X1800 XL installed on exactly the same PC, this soared to a whopping 4,896 as the entire system's performance was turbocharged by the video card.

Multimedia

The AIW X1800XL can pump out video to two monitors simultaneously, or a monitor and a TV screen. It's compatible with both standard and HDTV screens, and comes with a complete package of connectors for various display types.

Technology built into the card cleans up the signal being sent to a monitor. FullStream is a video de-blocking technology for the REAL Video, DivX and WMV9 audio/video formats, while VideoSoap filters out artifacts (fuzziness and random spots of colour) from captured video.

Video capture is one of the areas where the card excels. It has MPEG 1, 2 and 4 decoding and encoding accelerators, and full DXVA support, as well as iDCT and DCT colour space conversion. Plus, from a convenience point of view, all the video inputs are on small boxes that sit on your desktop and connect to the card via long cables. No more hunting for a port behind the PC to plug in a VCR or camcorder to transfer video - bliss!

ATI has dropped the Pinnacle video editing software that it shipped with the X800, as well as the neat bluescreen tools and video-creation package for websites. This is too bad, because the X800's software package was excellent if you wanted to basic or intermediate-level desktop video editing and special effects.

On the up-side, ATI has adopted Adobe's Premiere Elements 2.0 video package, which is a top-notch video editing suite for beginners. And in a first for the All-In-Wonder line, the X1800 XL also ships with photo editing software — Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. This Adobe bundle is arguably the most full-featured and easy to use package on the market for amateur users but still has some professional-level tools, and it underlines the fact that ATI's latest video accelerator isn't just for video — its technology can make photos look better on a screen, too.

And when it comes time to burn your home video onto a disc, the software package has a built-in program for controlling the recording of video CDs and DVDs — you won't have to fire up third-party software to do the burning.

One other neat piece of software that's not related to video editing is Game Shadow. You register the games you have stored on your computer, and the service will keep your system up to date with all the latest drivers and software patches that apply to those games.

TV

Then there's television. The major feature that sets the AIW X1800 XL apart from plain-Jane video cards is that is has a 125-channel TV tuner built right in, as well as inputs and dual-display outputs for various video sources, from DVD players to TVs and high-definition home theatre systems. You can send video to a VGA or DVI (digital) monitor, while a TV or VCR is also connected to the analogue output. The card can do dual desktop display to one VGA or DVI monitor and a second VGA monitor. For HDTV systems, the card even has a YPrPb adapter - lots of output options here, as I mentioned.

The tuner is excellent. I put it up against an older ATI TV Wonder card, a standalone TV tuner, and the results were a remarkable reduction in static and artifacts with the new X1800's tuner. I also tried a Hauppage tuner card, and the X1800 delivered not only a very noticeably cleaner image, but it was also able to tune a watchable signal from two channels that were mostly static "snow" using the Hauppage hardware.

ATI's Multimedia Center software suite is the core of the video playback and TV system. It has a slew of controls for tinkering with the video output quality and colour levels, as well as a toolbar that gives quick access to the features of the card and its software package.

Through its onboard Theatre 200 video decoder, the card has enough power to let you watch TV in a window on the screen while you work, too. In fact, like past All-In-Wonder cards, you can set the video so that it forms a faint background to your work — you can see the TV image on the screen, but also see your work through it. It sounds odd, but this "Thruview" system is an interesting effect if you want to keep up on, say, the news (or the ball game) while you work on a spreadsheet or document.

The TV tuner, tied to an Internet-based TV program guide called Gemstar Guide Plus+ that comes with the software bundle, lets the AIW X1800 XL work as a full-scale personal video recorder (PVR), basically turning your PC into a TiVo. It downloads a schedule every few days from the Internet, and you can record shows for later viewing, search for shows by keyword, and do pretty much everything a dedicated set-top box can do. For example, using the PVR to store video to the hard drive as you're watching TV, you can pause a live show and go to the fridge for a snack and resume playing when you get back. The system continues to record the rest of the show to the hard drive while you're watching the part of the show that has already been stored - very cool.

The only downside is that the tuner only works with cable or antenna signals. If you have satellite, digital cable or DSL TV, you'll need an external tuner box to decode the signal and send it to the card, plus the PVR scheduling features won't work because they're tailored for broadcast and cable channels.

But for those watching cable an over-the-air broadcasts, you can also add a second PCI tuner card if you choose in order to get full picture-in-picture, or to record one show while watching another.

The card also has an FM tuner, and you can record radio shows to the PC's hard drive.

You'll need a lot of hard drive space to really use the AIW X1800 to its fullest, though. When recording home videos, I saved them as AVI files since that format is widely compatible with various video editing packages and video players. Roughly eight hours of video took up about 150 gigabytes of space. TV shows take up less if they're recorded at a lower quality or using higher-compression formats such as MPEG, but they'll still take up several gigabytes per hour. If you're contemplating an upgrade to the AIW X1800 XL, it's probably worth looking at a new secondary hard drive at the same time to store video.

All the playback and recording features are tied together by ATI's Remote Wonder Plus, a long-range radio frequency remote control that works through walls. Besides the video features, it also lets you run programs such as a digital music player on your PC remotely. There's an extra-large on-screen interface so that you can see what you're controlling on the screen from a distance, and so that menus will be readable on a low-resolution television screen as well as a full computer display.

The remote worked fine, but for some reason it doesn't come with default settings out of the box to launch things like the TV guide listings. You can program this into keys of your choice through the remote's setup menu, but it's odd that some rather commonly used features don't come pre-programmed.

Remote-control-settings aside, if you're building a media server to work with a home theatre system, it does get much better than this - A/V control from the couch, even if the PC is in a nearby room.

Setup:

Despite all these features, setup is easy because the AIW X1800 XL is a single card. You plug it into a PCIe slot just like any other video card, although you do need to make sure your motherboard supports full PCIe x16, and you'll need the space for it in the computer and an available PCIe power connector from your power supply, as I mentioned earlier.

The most complicated part of the setup is figuring out which cables go where. The package comes with two breakout boxes of inputs and outputs, each on a long cable. Plus, the TV tuner does not supply digital audio over the system bus, so you have to plug a plain old patch cord into your sound card's line-in jack to feed it audio. There's a poster to walk you through all this, though, and while it might look like a plan for an atomic bomb at first, it's actually not that difficult if you take the time to study the instructions carefully.

I had some problems with the drivers and TV scheduler for the AIW X800 XL, this card's predecessor, but the AIW X1800 XL's software installed smoothly. I installed the hardware and ran the drivers, and was up and running in under 10 minutes — the only hitch was that the system froze when doing an initial scan of FM stations in my area, and the program had to be restarted. But overall it was a very simple setup procedure. Even a novice user should be able to handle the installation in about half an hour — with most of that spent reading the setup poster.

Conclusion:

I expected decent graphics performance from this card, but the gaming power of the AIW X1800 XL combined with its full slate of multimedia features left me dazzled. This is a card that will keep both multimediaphiles and all but the most hard-core, overclocking-crazy gamers happy. And the software bundle is a great bonus for anyone who wants to do some video editing — the Adobe software alone is worth a couple of hundred dollars at retail.

It's a very pricey card, but if you're looking for a rich multimedia features as well as great gaming performance and you can make use of the software bundle, you can't go wrong with the All-in-Wonder X1800 XL. It will handle pretty much anything you throw at it with aplomb.

ATI All-In-Wonder X800 XL PCIe card

By IAN JOHNSON Monday, January 9, 2006
Globe and Mail

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