Digital Trends

ATI All-In-Wonder X1900

February 6th, 2006 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

ATI didn't send us a final manual with the AIW X1900 so we can't tell you how well they describe the setup process; we went in blind folded so to speak.

You must have a pretty hefty system in order to meet ATI's requirements for using this card. You will need a PCI-Express x16 based motherboard, at least a 450watt power supply, a Pentium 4/Celeron or AMD Athlon class processor and at least 256MB of system memory. We also want to warn you that this is a huge card, measuring in at 10-inches long. We had trouble getting this into our test system, and were forced to move the hard drive in order to get it into the case. If you have a small case, this card is out of the question, and if you have a store bought system, make sure you buy this card from a store with a good return policy because there is a chance it won't fit into your system either.

Once we installed the card and plugged in our monitor, the FM antenna and our cable TV, we fired up our system and prepared to install the software. Surprisingly, we were able to install the Catalyst software without it crashing our system even once. It took about 10 minutes to get everything installed and required a couple restarts during the process.

The Gemstar Guide Plus software scanned our incoming cable signal and programmed all of the stations for viewing. You can use the guide separately as with ATI's Multimedia Center Software or you can use ATI's new EazyLook Multimedia Center software which acts like a Media Center type front-end, allowing you to choose which operation you want. The new GUI looks great and does a fantastic job of tying all of the applications together.

For the most part everything worked as advertised. You really need to sit down and spend a good 4-5 hours playing with everything before you can fully understand how to use this card. ATI has done a great job getting multiple applications and products to work together, but a little more polish would be nice. We sometimes encountered a software crash and at times it felt like minutes before the software would load.

If you have a PC running Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition, the AIW X1900 is completely compatible. It will use the TV and FM radio tuners on the AIW X1900. We recommend that you use the MCE operating system as the default GUI for accessing your recorded shows and media though. The Remote Wonder II will work with MCE so you don't need to buy another remote control.

Image Courtesy of ATI Technologies

For those of you looking to build an HTPC or MCE PC from scratch rather than adding this card to your existing Media PC, we recommend that you get an X1800 or lower card and then add the ATI TV Wonder Elite tuner card and a Hauppauge HDTV card to your system. The ATI TV Wonder Elite tuner card features the Theater 550 PRO video decoder which is better than the Theater 200 found on the AIW X1900, plus you can upgrade your video card in the future without having to buy a new tuner card. Another issue we found is that due to the sheer size of the AIW X1900 card (10 inches long) is simply will not fit in most Media Center PC's, plus the heat sink and fan puts out a lot of heat and noise making it more ideal for a desktop PC.

When it comes to games, the AIW X1900 is a solid performer. It's not as fast as the X1900 XT or XTX and the Nvidia 7800GTX passes it up too, but the AIW X1900 does a great job on all but the most demanding games; you will have no problem playing Battlefield 2 at 1600x1200 resolution with 4XAA turned on. For complete game benchmarks, please click on the performance tab and link located above and below this review.