HotHardware reviews ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 2006 video card
ATI's All-In-Wonder series has been popular with the multimedia enthusiast for quite some time now, delivering all the features of a TV Tuner, along with the performance of a dedicated graphics card. ATI has recently released their X1900 AIW series, which is a perfect card to get if you're a gamer and have the cash to spend. But what about those who are just looking for the features of an All-In-Wonder card, and consider gaming to be a side luxury? For this end of the market, ATI presents you with their All-In-Wonder 2006. This budget level PCI-E card is based on ATI's Radeon X1300 core GPU and uses ATI's Theatre 200 chip. We would have liked to see ATI using their newer more powerful Theater 550 Pro chip. However driver advancements and ATI's H.264 decode acceleration algorithms help beef up processing with the Thearter 200. Still, there's no hardware MPEG-2 encode support, which ATI's Theater 550 Pro has.
In addition, AIW 2006 doesn't have the pixel pushing power of the AIW X1900 but priced in at around $200, we'll be focusing on it's feature set more so than it's gaming performance. We'll also be doing some testing to see how well the card is able to take the load off of the CPU during digital media playback, and judging it by it's overall value for its price range. Let's not get ahead of ourselves though, first we'll need to cover the specs...
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