Last month, ATI unveiled their All-In-Wonder X1800 XL, a high-end part with the price tag to match. For the most part, the big chunk of the $400 pie is due to the VPU, thus targeting the AIW X1800 XL towards gaming enthusiasts with an interest in multimedia.

Now, just over a month later, ATI is releasing the ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 PCI Express, a sub-$200 product based on the X1300 VPU (non-Pro), which differs from the All-In-Wonder 2006 released earlier this year as that was based on the Radeon 9600, as well as being AGP based. As you may expect, the AIW 2006 PCI Express will not have the raw horsepower of the AIW X1800, but it is significantly cheaper and features the same multimedia features as its more expensive brother.

The ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 PCI Express

The All-In-Wonder 2006 PCI Express is quite a bit shorter in length than the AIW X1800 XL, so fitting it into smaller cases or SFF PCs should be much easier this time around. Nothing too significant appearance-wise, with everything laid out in its respective places similar to what we're used to with ATI's previous AIW cards. The AIW 2006 is ATI's second PCI Express offering in the All-In-Wonder family. With this product, ATI has addressed the low-end mainstream and with the AIW X1800, the high-end mainstream.

The Radeon X1300 VPU used in the AIW 2006 PCIE is clocked at 450MHz, though our card was a little low as seen in the screenshot above. The new 90nm manufacturing process allows ATI to scale clock speeds upwards more easily as they expand their product line, but a side benefit is that the core will consume less power than before. A PCI Express power adapter is not required for the AIW 2006 PCIE.

The AIW 2006's VPU features full support of Shader Model 3.0, always on 32FP processing, and 4 pixel shader units. Avivo is fully supported in hardware, as well as Advanced HDR, 3Dc, Smartshader, Videoshader, Hyper-Z, and Smoothvision HD. We covered all of these features in our AIW X1800 XL review so we invite you to check it out for more information.

The low clock speed of the AIW 2006 PCIE (compared to the high-end cards) allows the card to get away with a single slot cooling solution. ATI uses a similar shaped cooler as the reference X1300, though the fan is a little smaller. Compared to the X1800 XL, the AIW 2006 PCIE is much quieter and better suited for a true HTPC environment where noise may be an issue.

ATI uses the higher spec'd version of the X1300 for the AIW 2006 PCIE as this card is armed with 256MB of ram. The Infineon memory runs at 400MHz (800DDR), though our card was a little higher at 401MHz.

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. 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 Theater 200 consumes a mere 0.86W, and is responsible for receiving analog video signals and transforming them into digital ITU-656 compliant video. There are dual 12-bit ADC converters which are responsible for cleaning up some of the noise associated when converting an analog stream. A 2D 3-line comb filter cleans up composite video signals by making sure they are more accurately processed.

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.

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.

To meet the MSRP of $199 USD, some items found in the more expensive packages were left out for the All-In-Wonder 2006 PCI Express. YPrPb output block is not included, though it is available as a separate purchase. The remote is also not included, but in our conversations with ATI, a voucher for a free Remote Wonder will be included with the final retail product.

ATI does include a fairly good software package at this price. Naturally, we have a driver CD as well as the latest version of Multimedia Center. In addition to those, we have Gemstar's GuidePlus+ which is a free integrated program guide for North Americans only. ATI will also bundle Adobe's Premiere Elements 2.0 which is a fairly good program for video editing and should be sufficient for casual video editors.

Gaming Performance

Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz), Gigabyte GA-VT880 Combo, 2x1GB Corsair XMS2 PC6400, Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.7, Realtek onboard audio enabled.

The games to be used for benchmarking are as follows:

Doom 3 v1.3

Far Cry v1.33

Half-Life 2

All testing will be done with default driver installations, set to quality, with AntiAliasing and Anisotropic filtering turned off. Due to time constraints, we only performed FRAPS testing at 1024 and 1280 with just the AIW 2006 PCIE. In Far Cry, we'll be pitting the ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 PCI Express up against the XFX GeForce 6600, the Radeon X1300's direct competitor, as well as the ATI AIW X600 Pro which was ATI's previous sub-$200 AIW product. Bench'emAll!'s default timedemos will be used to collect our scores for Far Cry.

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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