As mentioned earlier, the VPU is clocked at 500MHz and built on the 90nm manufacturing process. While the main benefit will be the ability to scale clock speeds upwards, the core will consume less power than before. A PCI Express power adapter will still be required, and although it wasn't sent with our press kit, one will be provided in the retail kit. As with the reference card, the memory is rated at 500MHz (1GHz).

The AIW X1800 XL does not run as fast as the X1800 XT, therefore it can get away with a single slot cooling solution. Another heat dealing solution is the card will run at two different clock speeds depending if it is in 3D (or gaming) mode or 2D mode. Furthermore at all times, Dynamic Voltage Control allows voltage throttling, depending on the VPU loads and again, this controls the heat.

As for the cooling solution itself, ATI uses a similar, if not the same copper cooler as the reference X1800 XL. Depending on the heat, the fan will either run at full speed, or at low speed (nothing in between). Under full speed, the AIW X1800 XL is quite loud, but low speed is not noisy at all. The problem though is the card seemed to be running full speed most of the time while watching TV, so this could be a problem if you're building a serious HTPC, and by serious I mean a quiet HTPC.

Moving on to the multimedia features, we have both the Microtune 2121 TV Tuner and the Theater 200 chip making a return to the AIW. We've covered the Theater 200 to death here, and while we were disappointed the Theater 550 did not appear, Avivo should make up for this for reasons we've already covered.

The Microtune 2121 first showed up on the AIW X800 XL and it is significantly smaller than previous chips used. It does preserve some PCB space, and the new chip uses 10% less power than before (the new chip consumes less than 2W), therefore it runs cooler.

The IO connections are pretty much a straight copy of what we've seen before. For your input and output options, moving from left to right is the first Coaxial connector for the FM receiver, followed by the second Coaxial connection for standard cable television. Next we have the input connection for the video input and output blocks (as well as a VGA output), followed by the DVI connection.

Along with the AIW X1800 XL, there were the usual suite of items included. We're not 100% sure of what the final product will be, but you can expect video cables, a remote, input and output blocks as well as multimedia software and Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and Premiere Elements 2.0.

Much slimmer than previous models, the Remote Wonder Plus is a newer remote last seen here with the AIW X800 XL and is included with the bundle. While the current lineup of All-In-Wonder cards are supported by Microsoft's Media Center, the remote is not. The Remote Wonder Plus itself is good for up to 60' (walls, and other factors will affect this) and is fully programmable to perform a number of Windows functions. If that isn't enough, there are plenty of free plug-ins all over the web to extend the functionality.

As we've seen from the last several AIWs, there are couple of stackable blocks for input and output, each with raised and recessed nubs to lock them together. The input block (left image) has four connection points in the following order; S-Video, Composite, left and right audio. The output block (right image) has the same connections as well (heading the opposite direction), plus the following attached lower on the cable; SPDIF, Line-In and Line-Out.

The special dongle above will allow you to either use a traditional CRT monitor as a primary or secondary display. Like before, the All-In-Wonder does not accommodate dual DVI display methods. Connected to this dongle are also the input and output feeds for the blocks mentioned earlier, as well as the block pictured below.

The YPrPb connections, AKA, Component, are the premium output connections for the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL. Short of the newest high definition standards, this is one of the best video connections available, surpassing that of S-Video. Unfortunently, you are only limited to YPrPb output from the PC and not the other way around.

Gaming Performance

Athlon 64 4000+, MSI K8N Platinum, 2x512MB Corsair XM2 PC3200, Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.7, Creative onboard audio enabled.

The games to be used for benchmarking are as follows:

Doom 3 v1.3

Chronicles of Riddick

Unreal Tournament 2004 v3355

Far Cry v1.33

Half-Life 2

We'll be pitting the ATI All-In-Wonder X1800 XL up against the ASUS N7800 GT, the X1800 XL's direct competitor, as well as the MSI NX6800 GT, and ATI X850 Platinum Edition. We chose these two older cards to compare it's performance against what were ATI's and NVIDIA's previous high-end and mainstream respectfully.

All testing will be done with default driver installations, set to quality, with AntiAliasing and Anisotropic filtering turned on. Bench'emAll!'s default timedemos will be used to collect our scores, except for Half-Life 2 where FRAPS was used.

All games were set to their highest allowable game settings. The latest chipset and video drivers at the time of testing were used for the tests.

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