ATI’s All-In-Wonder X800XT is the must have card for multimedia and gaming enthusiasts still on the AGP platform, not many people would argue that. If gaming isn’t a primary concern you also have various other AIW versions to choose from. If you happen to be a PCI-Express user the choice of AIW products until now was limited to the X600 version which is hardly ideal for high resolution gaming.

Another area in which ATI have recently excelled is the PCIe version of the X800GT. Rave reviews are surfacing all over the web and as far as the price bracket goes the GT should be certainly on your shortlist.

So to spice things up a little, what if ATI were to combine the excellent multimedia features of the X800XT AGP with the great value and performance of a PCIe X800GT and then, just for good measure throw in some excellent new features… do we have your attention now?

The ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder X800GT PCIe 128mb with DVB-T

Below you can see the AIW X800GT in all its glory. As with many of their recent multimedia products ATI are using the Purple PCB with gold components. Whilst for the most part the card looks very appealing the choice of heatsink on the reference model is certainly not as nice as the X800XT retail model and tends to tarnish the overall appearance. Underneath the heatsink you will find the R430 core which is used in the X800XL Radeons. The only difference with the X800GT AIW is that only 8 of the pipelines in the R430 core are used rather than 16. Additionally the GT retains the 6 vertex shaders of the XL branded card. Finally, the core is clocked at 400mhz.

The standard Theatre 200 video processor shows up again on the X800GT AIW, it is not the most up to date video chip available, however it does provide excellent quality and is completely stable at all times.

The Theatre 200 receives the TV signals from the tuner, it then passes through one of the T200’s two 12-bit analogue-to-digital converters, then from here the signal is passed to the T200’s 2D 3-line comb filter, through the video scaler and then out to your display (creating digital ITU-656 compliant video). The chip also performs audio demodulation and stereo decoding.

On recent AIW’s such as the X800GT and XT the T200 uses a 100pin design which only requires 0.86w for operation.

ATI have again gone with a silicon tuner on the GT and like the AGP X800 version the tuner is encased in a gold coloured box. If you were to open up the box you would find a Microtune MT2121 tuner in there…but more on that later.

Flipping over the card you can see that not all memory locations are filled on this card. For the AIW X800GT ATI have opted for 128mb in 4x32mb chips (2 front, 2 rear).

The Memory used on our sample is manufactured by Samsung and is rated at 2.0ns (max 500mhz), the actual memory speed is 490mhz. Its good to see that ATI have stuck with a 256bit memory interface on this model which ensures you are getting as much performance from the 128mb as possible.

Also located on the back is the VIA VT1623M Scart chip on the European AIW versions providing both video and stereo audio out, this is the same chip used on the X800XT and provides excellent quality.

The PCI bracket connectors on the new PCIe card exactly match the AGP AIW model and are therefore DVI, ATI, TV in and FM in.

The ATI connector supplied with the GT is exactly the same as the connector used on the XT, here is what it looks like along with the FM antenna and the Domino block which provides additional connectivity such as S-Video and Composite in.

Here is the Full specification for the card courtesy of ATI:

 

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