2D Desktop Quality
We loaded up a 1600x1200 image (modified for 1680x1050) used in previous video card reviews. I also pulled up several word documents with various sized fonts to judge the text rendering. The documents used white text on a black background, and vice versa. The screen resolution for all tests was 1680x1050 @ 60Hz on a Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW LCD.
Scores are subjective, but having worked with many video cards the last few years, I got a pretty firm grasp on what card renders 2D better than the others. The scores will be out of 10, with 10 being excellent.
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All-in-Wonder X1800 XL
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ASUS N7800 GT
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MSI NX6800 GT
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ATI X850 PE
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Black Text (12Pt)
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9
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9
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9
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9
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Black Text (6Pt)
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8
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8
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7
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8
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White Text (12Pt)
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8
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8
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8
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8
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White Text (6Pt)
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7
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7
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7
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6
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Bitmap Quality
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8
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8
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7
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8
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All the cards were fairly close, with the only real problem being 6Pt black and white text.
TV Out Quality
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AIW X1800 XL
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Sat Receiver
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The TV output was something of a mixed bag using a S-Video connection, and the bottleneck we think may be the television. Movie playback was very good, but the 2D Windows was not terribly strong and will hinge greatly on the supported resolutions of the television.
Avivo does cut down on the aliasing though, as we found this to be an issue with the AIW X800 XL we looked at last week. While we did work around it on the X800 XL, the system was under a 20% CPU load on average, but the AIW X1800 XL was well under that at 7%, demonstrating the acceleration present in the newer hardware.
Capture Quality
We setup a prerecorded trailer of The Village on our satellite PVR and via a S-Video cable, ran the feed to the AIW X1800 XL, an AIW X800 XL, and an ASUS TV Tuner (from the P5WD2 kit).
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AIW X1800 XL
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AIW X800 XL
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ASUS Tuner
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The two ATI tuners share have similar image quality, with the slight edge for the X1800 XL. Avivo did play a role here as we were able to tweak the settings to achieve a slightly sharper image quality with less aliasing. The ASUS tuner had some colour issues and "patches", though nothing too terrible. Keep in mind that we used the same S-Video cable (from Monster) for all the feeds. Cable quality matters as we'll demonstrate in a moment.
Capture Quality - Cable Specific
Video quality is going to rely heavily on the type of (and the quality) of input cables. Out of the box, the AIW X1800 XL supports three input options for video capture which are COAX, Composite, S-Video. As mentioned earlier, the Component connections are limited to output only. Clicking the thumbs below will open a new window.
In order of quality, COAX will give you the worst quality, with Composite in the middle and S-Video as the best. The differences are quite obvious on a decent HDTV, though older CRT-type televisions may not display the differences very clearly.
Overclocking
We've seen some pretty impressive overclocking with the stock cooling and the X1800 XL. However, we were not expecting as much luck with the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL given all the extras built into the card. Still, it was worth a shot, and managed to crank the card as high as 610MHz core and 650MHz memory which is a 110MHz and 150MHz overclock of the core and memory respectively.
| Doom 3 - 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAFF |
FPS
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| AIW X1800 XL 500/500 |
48.7
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| AIW X1800 XL 610/650 |
57.5
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The overclock netted us a 9fps gain in Doom 3. Keep in mind VPU recover needed to be disabled to manage this. Temperatures after the benchmark run hovered in the low 50s. We do think there may be some more overclocking headroom, but we only had a week to play with the hardware before today's launch.
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