All-In-Wonder for gaming?

[jclbeldin]

I cant find any specs on the the All-In-Wonder cards as far as gaming performance is concerned. Maybe thats because they suck??? I am thinking of buying an All-In-Wonder X-1900 PCI Express 256mb card, but am leery about the gaming side of things. I want to be able to record / watch TV too with just one card if possible. Any technical suggestions....

Thanks in advance.

 

[cleeve]

The AIW X1900 runs about as fast as the X1950 PRO. Pretty decent gamers.

The real plus with those X1900 AIW cards is that they sometimes have ALOT of overclocking headroom because they have underclocked X1900 XT GPUs.

 

[nobly]

Here's one. You didn't say which card, so I just googled "all-in-wonder gaming benchmark"
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/videocards/article.php/3211_3598046__4

 

[pkellmey]

I tried gaming with All-In-Wonder. For TV/Multi-Media it is awesome. However, what you will quickly find is that with many games, the video driver is not very stable. I even found a few games that specifically stated on their support website not to use All-In-Wonder because of lack of driver support. After my discoveries, I use NVidia graphics for gaming because it seems very well supported by most games, or you could even use a straight ATI graphics card, but get a seperate ATI TV Tuner card (or equivalent because ATI is sometimes pricey). That really gives you the best of both worlds, and the ATI tuner software is usually very good at TV and PVRs.

 

[cleeve]

Maybe you had a bad card.

I used an AIW X1800 for a long time and even overclocked it to 725 Mhz on the core... it was rock solid for me.

But yeah, it usually makes more sense to buy a separate video card and capture/tuner card. Then you can upgrade your video card without changing your tuner all the time, and it usually ends up cheaper.

Although, I'm curious... how much is the X1900 AIW this fellow is considering?

 

[nobly]

Sorry somehow didn't see you did have the 1900 specified.
Googled "AIW 1900 benchmark" and i got this.

http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/video/ati/r5xx/aiw1900/
Not sure how reliable they are but data is data...

I have an old AIW 9600XT. I bought it because I knew whenever I upgrade, I could just slide that one into a home theater computer, or something. I've got a number of computers so it just gets hand-me-down'd to the next computer.

 

[palmor]

There are a couple on eekBay for ~140 buyout.

 

[jclbeldin]

Thanks for all the good replys guys!
Since I posted I also found a good report on AnandTech
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2691&p=1

All in all the advice about using separate cards makes sense, but I dont switch cards very often and think this is a great buy right now.

I think this card even supports crossfire... correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks for the good info![/u]

 

[sojrner]

I oc'd and gamed very well on my old 9700pro AIW. Still have it in a secondary system that still rocks the casbah on many games. Can even play FEAR to an extent.

Dunno what the guy above could have had w/ his issues, but the video drivers are the same as a non-aiw card. All ati cards (radeons) run on the catalyst drivers and b/c the gpu in the 1900aiw is the same as the 1900xt/xtx (as cleeve mentioned) then there should not be any stability differences unless you just get a bad card.

My only regret about my 9700pro is that (like what was suggested above) even though it was my primary gamer for more than 3 years, it would have been nice to move the tuner to another system. Oh well, still a good choice. You should have no prbs man. Game on.

 

[jrivera04]

I have the X800XL AIW PCIe and I love the card. It can do everything you mentioned and I play Guild Wars at 1280x1024 with no problems. All graphics setting are set on high by the way.

 

[hobbitfeet]

I have a All-In-Wonder x1900 and it works great. It's really fast and can play pretty much all games at max settings. The video capturing is very easy and has really clear/clean results.
With a bigger fan and heatsink the AIW can be overclocked to perform aswell as the x1900 xt/xtx if not better. But you really need good cooling to attempt to overclock this card because it gets hot real fast.

So if you want an all in one card buy it you can't go wrong.


There is no Crossfire support with this card.

 

[jclbeldin]

Thats it, I've decided to get one within the next month. That is of course if they are still in stock...

Do they come with a remote? For tv watching.

This was a very good post. Thanks to all that participated in helping me decide to get one of these cards.

/oom
60 gnome mage ftl

 

[sojrner]

yes they come w/ a remote. Very nice one. Ati's "remote wonder" (version 1,2,pro or whatever)

I still use mine in many systems even w/o the card. Great little tool. Better than most remotes that come w/ other tuner cards IMO, great mouse functionality.

 

[steve4king]

The old AIWs were actually much slower versions of the gaming card with the same number.

But since the 2nd generation radeons they have all been full speed. It should work fine for gaming.

 

[cleeve]

The X1900s are actually alot slower than the XTs or XTXs.. but they aren't called XTs of XTXs, either.

 

[altosaxplayer01]

I bought an x1900 All-In-Wonder for my rig in august and it is very awesome!! I can play BF2142 at full settings and high resolution along with Quake4, FEAR, and Half Life2(the hdr effects are amazing)!!!! This card is very overclockable!! But it does not need it. I did need to upgrade from my stock power supply(i think it was a 300 WAtt) to a 550 Watt from Ultra(lifetime warrenty!!). You will not be dissapointed. The tv tuner is great too. My system specs are as follows:

Monitor: AOC 19in Wide Screen LCD
CPU: AMD64 3500+ @ 2.4 Ghz
HD: Maxtor 220 GB
MEM: 1536MB DDR400
Sound: Creative Audigy Pro 4
Graphics: AIW x1900
Moither Board: Abit KN8 Ultra