ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon X1800 XL

With the exception of the gold shielding over the silicon tuner and the various outputs on the card's backplane, the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL looks very much like the standard Radeon X1800 XL introduced early last month. Both versions of the card feature Volterra's multi-phase voltage regulator underneath a thin, red, aluminum heatsink at the far end of the PCB, and they have the same single-slot, variable-speed cooling apparatus as well.

Inspecting The All-In-Wonder Radeon X1800 XL She's a Big One

The Radeon X1800 XL GPU at the heart of the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL is manufactured using TSMC's .09 micron process and is composed of roughly 321 million transistors. The GPU features ATI's new "Ultra-Threaded architecture" with Shader Model 3.0 support, AVIVO, and fast dynamic branching. As we mentioned earlier, the Radeon X1800 XL GPU has 16-pixel shader processors, but it also has 8-vertex shader processors, and is equipped with a 256-bit, 8-channel memory interface. The card's core is clocked at 500MHz and its 256MB of GDDR3 memory is clocked a 1GHz. At these clock speeds, a large-single slot cooler is sufficient to keep core and memory temperatures in check.

Unlike the standard Radeon X1800 XL though, the All-In-Wonder version sports a purple PCB with gold and red accents. The All-In-Wonder X1800 XL also differs from the standard version of the card in that it has only a one dual-link DVI output, along with F-Type FM and TV inputs, and a custom dongle connector on its backplane. The All-In-Wonder X1800 XL does have a second monitor output for multi-monitor support as well, but it is situated on a separate dongle and not on the card itself.

An integral component of the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL is the Microtune IC 2121; a small chip situated underneath the gold shielding at the upper-corner of the card.  The Microtune IC 2121 gives the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL its TV and FM tuning capabilities.  ATI switched to a silicon tuner a while back to reduce power consumption and free-up precious PCB real estate. The Microtune IC 2121 has much lower power requirements when compared to the older, and much larger, "tin-can" tuners found on early All-In-Wonder cards.  ATI claims the Microtune 2121 reduces power consumption by up to 11% over previous AIW products, with the tuner consuming only 1.5 watts of power.

Working in conjunction with the Microtune 2121 tuner is ATI's own Theater 200 chip. The Theater 200 sports dual 12-bit ADCs (Analog to Digital Converters), and handles all of the signal conversions from the card's TV/FM tuner and various inputs.  During the conversion process from an analog to a digital signal, the signal is passed through a 2D comb filter in the Theater 200 chip, and a video downscaler optimizes the output for your screen.  The Theater 200 is also responsible for demodulating and decoding audio streams into separate left and right channels.