The
Board
This
is one of the most interesting looking video card's we have ever seen. Occupying
the upper third of the PCB is the TV tuner with heavy RFshielding. Like all 64MB
TVIO Radeon cards, the Rage Theater chip provides video input/output abilities
and also handles the TV tuner input duties on the AiW cards. Video input is provided
through an external purple break out box providing S-Video, Composite and L-R
audio inputs. As well, video outputs include composite and S-Video, an audio passthrough
cable and S/PDIF for Dolby Digital output handle the audio duties. Audio decoded
from the TV input stream can be routed to the sound card via an internal CD-audio
cable, or the passthrough cable can be used to route it through the soundcard
mic or line in ports.
The
next thing that pops out and grabs your attention is the lack of a VGA port
on the rear of the card. No VGA port you say? ATI is one step ahead of us
here, providing a DVI connector in place of the standard VGA. Also included
in the box is a small adapter to convert the DVI signal to VGA for us mortals
without DVI monitors. This really says a lot about the longevity of this
card; DVI monitors are still well over a year from mass acceptance in North
America and Europe. On the other hand, Asia is already well into the change
over and the decision to include to replace the VGA connector was definitely
influenced by this.
When
the Radeon line of cards was introduced there was much confusion over the memory
configurations and clock speeds. The All-in-Wonder uses 32MB of 6ns (166mhz) Samsung
DDR RAM providing ~4.3Gbits/s of bandwidth. Currently all AiW cards are 32MB DDR,
but ATI has plans to provide both 16MB DDR and 32MB SDR cards to the OEM market
shortly into the new year. The 64MB DDR Radeon cards are slightly different, featuring
5.5ns (183mhz) Hyundai RAM but use the same Radeon chip as all other cards, except
clocked at 183mhz. This means that it should be no problem overclocking the AiW
to 183/183mhz, the RAM being the only questionable component.
Pixel
Tapestry 