The above picture doesn’t give you the full
idea of the size of this card though, for that we’ll
sit it side by side with an X850XT card…
The AIW X1900 is huge, really huge. Its approx
25% larger than the X8 series and comes in at around
the same width as a standard ATX motherboard.
Lifting off the heat sink we can see the core and
memory used by ATI. It’s a standard R580 core
clocked at 500mhz and making use of 48 pixel shader
units. Surrounding the core you can see 8 x 32mb
Samsung memory chips which are clocked at 480mhz.
On the reverse side of the cooler we can see that
a copper block is used for the GPU and the memory
has thermal pads transferring heat to the main cooler
unit.
At the top right of the card you can see the gold
tuner box. Underneath the cover is a Microtune MT2121.
This tuner converts RF signals received through
your source antenna into IF so that a demodulator
can process them. When receiving Analogue TV and
FM radio the tuner communicates with the Philips
TDA9887 demodulator. When in digital mode it passes
the signal to the ATI NXT6000 DVB-T demodulator.
The final component of note on the front of the
card is the VIA VT1623M Scart out chip which allows
the European AIW to output video and sound via the
Scart connector.
The side view of the card allows you to see the
connectors for this particular model. From left
to right (or top to bottom) you can see the FM radio
in, TV in, ATI connector and DVI out.
The rear of the card features the back of the tuner
cover and below it two important components.
Those two components are the Theatre 200 and the
NXT6000.
As we mentioned above the NXT chip (demodulator)
accepts the output from the tuner when in DVB-T
mode and then passes the signal to the Theatre 200
which then passes it through one of the two 12-bit
analogue-to-digital converters. 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.
Picture Quality
One of the major considerations when choosing a
TV tuner is the quality of picture you will receive
from the unit. To help you decide if the AIW X1900
is the tuner for you here are a selection of images
for you. We’ve only included digital TV captures
as there really isn’t any reason to use the
analogue tuner in DVB-T areas any more.
Please note for quality reasons the following
pictures are in BMP format, due to this they will
take longer than normal to load.
As you can see from the captures the picture is
crisp and clear throughout which is all you need
really. Sound quality is equally impressive and
matches any card we’ve used.
