Final Words

Our conclusions today will be from a couple of different standpoints, so let's see how the ATI All-In-Wonder X1800 XL stacks against the competition in a variety of scenarios.

Gaming Performance and Image Quality
We were pretty happy with the AIW X800 XL last week in this department, so as you may imagine, we're happier with the AIW X1800 XL. While this was not a desktop performance review per se, we do see that even for hard-core gamers, the card makes a pretty strong case against some of its competition. It was pretty close with the 7800 GT, the X1800 XL's direct competition, and generally faster overall that ATI's top-of-the-line, albeit a year ago.

CrossFire support is unknown at this time since there are currently no Master X1000 based cards available, and ATI has not done any testing internally (at least, nothing public) with the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL and CrossFire.

With the Avivo technology we expected to see some major improvements in the IQ department, but to be honest, it did not really make the impact we expected. That being said, overall, we found the AntiAliasing quality to be a bit stronger overall when compared to NVIDIA hardware, which wasn't really the case with ATI's previous generation of products. We didn't mention it earlier, but the user has far more control over Anisotropic filtering than before and which does a lot to make environments look nicer, especially in Battlefield 2, for example, which looked fantastic. With AA and HDR support coupled together, games with HDR support have a chance to shine as developers insert this feature into their lineup of games.

Multimedia Summary
The ATI All-In-Wonder X1800 XL isn't all about games of course, and the main selling point really is the X1800 XL combined with the myriad of multimedia features put into the product. Simply put, nobody from NVIDIA, Hauppage, Matrox, S3 or anywhere offers anything close to what the AIW family, let alone the AIW X1800 XL can offer.

While Avivo didn't really do us much good in gaming, it did give us a fair number of options when it came to video playback. To be honest though, we were able to achieve similar image quality with an ATI X850 PE, not Avivo supported, so we're hoping to see that killer Avivo app appear shortly to make an impact. Right now, we found Avivo had little impact on our Dell LCD, but it did play a bigger role when we were outputting video to our HD Hitachi television. It also put less of a hit on the CPU compared with previous generation hardware.

Value
One question or comment that has always come up whenever we publish an All-In-Wonder review is, "why not pick up a dedicated gaming card and TV tuner instead?", which is actually a valid concern. A TV tuner is something you can conceivably move from PC to PC or video card to video card over the upgrade life-cycle of your setup.

However, there are a few drawbacks to this. For one thing, a good TV tuner that is also supported by XP Media Center 2005 (which the post mid-2003 All-In-Wonder products support) is going to easily run you around $100 or more.

It will also eat up one PCI slot as well. This can in turn cause issues if a) You only have one PCI slot (such as setups in SFF PCs), or B) If you have multiple peripherals using slots up. Nevermind the fact that there is some extra legwork keeping different drivers up to date (and possible breaking your primary display drivers).

From ATI's marketing perspective, the ATI All-In-Wonder X1800 XL will retail at about $430, a mere $30 more than the vanilla X1800 XL. Add to it over $100 of editing software (Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0, Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0) and a $50 remote, as well as all the required cabling, and Gemstar GuidePlus+, the value is pretty good.

The main thing is whether or not ATI can release this product in volume. As of this writing, we haven't spotted anything on PriceGrabber, but we'll be keeping an eye on it over the next few days.

Pros: Good performance, good price value compared to the vanilla X1800 XL. Plenty of extras, plus strong multimedia features.

Cons: Avivo not quite ready to make an impact. CrossFire support unknown.

Bottom Line: Naturally, an upper-mainstream product will command the appropriate price. Again, pure gamers will probably not look at the AIW X1800 XL due to missing SLI (and currently CrossFire) support and look towards a true gamer's card for either cost or performance considerations. Of course, despite the strong gaming performance, the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL is not being marketed as such. The All-In-Wonder X1800 XL real strength is that it is geared to those who do more than play games, and in that respect it is very strong.