Video hardware

New silicon tuner

If you’ve seen older ALL-IN-WONDER cards, you’ve no doubt noticed the huge Philips TV tuner ATI typically integrates on their cards. The old tuners didn’t generate a lot of heat, and were quite responsive, switching channels quite rapidly, but they took up an enormous amount of real estate on the AIW board, swamping the entire upper portion of the PCB in most cases.

The ALL-IN-WONDER X800 XT was the first AIW card ATI announced to use a new silicon tuner from Microtune, the MT2050. The MT2050 contained fewer parts, making it considerably smaller than its predecessor and allowing it to consume less power and thus generate less heat. But the only downside to the MT2050 was that it wasn’t as responsive as the Philips TV tuner ATI had used on previous ALL-IN-WONDER products. Changing channels took 1-2 seconds to complete with MT2050, whereas the previous tuners could switch channels in the blink of an eye. Fortunately ATI has addressed this issue, replacing Microtune’s MT2050 tuner with the MT2121 for the ALL-IN-WONDER X1800 XL.

The new MT2121 tuner is silicon-based just like its predecessor, so it boasts all the space and power savings mentioned previously, only with slightly better channel response time. Flipping through channels is better with this new tuner, but still not up to par with the Philips tuners ATI has used in the past.

THEATER 200

First launched with the ALL-IN-WONDER 9700 PRO four years ago, the THEATER 200 chip is now a staple of ATI’s WONDER products, and is the backbone of the AIW X1800 XL’s multimedia capability. The THEATER 200 chip receives the signals from the Microtune tuner chip, where it is then passed through one of the THEATER 200’s two 12-bit analog-to-digital converters (many competing solutions use 9-bit ADCs). From the ADC, the signal is passed to the THEATER 200’s 2D 3-line comb filter, through the video scaler, and ultimately passed on to your monitor. The chip also handles all audio duties, performing audio demodulation and stereo decoding.

THEATER 200 doesn’t boast all the capabilities found in ATI’s latest THEATER product, THEATER 550 PRO, such as the hardware-based MPEG-2 encoding and the 550’s new 3D comb filter, but it’s still a pretty capable part. In our THEATER 550 PRO roundup earlier this year, we judged that the THEATER 550 PRO cards looked better, but if you click back through the screenshots you’ll see that the difference in image quality between the THEATER 550 PRO and THEATER 200 isn’t huge. In other words, THEATER 200 still looks good even though it isn’t as advanced as the THEATER 550 PRO.