Tuesday, April 12, 2005

ALL-IN-WONDER X800 XT Offers Performance and Multimedia Caps. Latest ALL-IN-WONDER Graphics Cards Examined

5:46 pm | Anton Shilov

ATI ALL-IN-WONDER series of products have always been the industry’s most sophisticated and feature-rich graphics cards, as in addition to powerful visual processing units they sported a broad set of multimedia capabilities. Unfortunately, the complicated board design and some other issues did not let ATI to introduce AIW products right after the company’s latest VPU is launched; as a consequence, the commercial products as well as reviews of ALL-IN-WONDER based on the RADEON X800 XT introduced 11 months ago make it to the market and the Web only now.

Beyond3D has written an extensive review of ATI’s ALL-IN-WONDER X800 XT board trying to cover every aspect of such graphics card, including TV picture quality, 3D performance, video performance and even overclocking.

“Clearly, though, the All-In-Wonder X800 XT is a very high performance 3D graphics board, offering up to 2x-3x the performance of ATI's previous high end All-In-Wonder 9800 PRO and not too far behind the very latest high end standard graphics boards ATI have to offer, with better PC and Audio/Video output options, the additional capabilities of TV and FM Radio reception, with all the PVR functionality that goes with that, and video file capture capabilities if you need it. All of this comes packaged in a fairly compact, single slot, board that will be suitable for most systems including Shuttle type small form factor PC's,” reports Beyond3D.

The web-site notes that ATI’s THEATER 550 PRO TV card is much better in terms of MPEG quality than the latest AIW.

“At the very least ATI have topped themselves in terms of MPEG quality with the Theater 550 PRO boards and anyone looking to do some serious video capture may well be best served looking at separate solutions like that for the time being,” concludes the web-site.

• Beyond3D: ATI ALL-IN-WONDER X800 XT Review.

iPod Mini 6GB Music Player Reviewed. Second Flavour of iPod Mini Adds Improvements

5:29 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

TrustedReviews has taken a look at Apple’s latest addition to the popular iPod family of music players. The redesigned iPod mini features 6GB of storage, up from 4GB on previous generation, improved battery life to 18 hours from 8 hours on ancestor and some other enhancements over predecessors. Despite of the expansions, the iPod mini still does not have built-in radio and microphone.

“With the new iPod mini, Apple has increased its capacity by a third, battery-life by two-and-a-half times and improved sound quality. It’s a pretty impressive triple whammy and as long as its capacity is large enough for you, the iPod mini would be our recommended digital audio player,” concludes TrustedReviews.

• TrustedReviews: iPod mini - 2nd Gen 6GB.

New DDR2 Memory Overclocking World Record. Corsair’s Memory Overclocked to 1174MHz Speed

4:13 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

Legit Reviews web-site has again set the world’s record with DDR2 overclocking by reaching 1174MHz clock-speed using Corsair’s XMS2-5400UL memory modules. The testing was carried out on a mainboard powered by Intel’s forthcoming 955X core-logic and Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz processor.

No special cooling systems were noted as used to maximize stability at 1174MHz speed-bin with CL5 5-5-7 latency settings. According to Legit Reviews’ Nathan Kirsch, the modules still could pass Sandra and Everest benchmarks, but were not absolutely stable even at 1049MHz. Voltage settings of the memory modules are unclear.

Last week the overclockers of Legit Reviews conducted an experiment in the course of which specialists from the web-site managed to overclock Corsair XMS2-5400UL memory module kit to the speed of 1000MHz, hitting the milestone for both DDR2 and DDR memory types.

• Legit Reviews: DDR2@1174MHz.
• XtremeSystems: New World Record 1174MHz DDR2.
• CPU-Z Validator Database.

• X-bit labs: Corsair’s Memory Overclocked to 1.0GHz Speed.

Archive
All Latest News