ATI lineup comparison

With speeds of 500MHz on the graphics core and 480MHz for the memory, the clock speeds of ATI’s All-In-Wonder X1900 should look awfully familiar to anyone who’s followed ATI’s graphics cards: these speeds are nearly identical to the Radeon X1800 XL and All-In-Wonder X1800 XL, which shipped with a 500MHz graphics core and 500MHz memory.

In case you were wondering why 480MHz instead of 500MHz for the All-In-Wonder X1900’s memory, ATI stated that they were shooting for the board’s memory modules to run at an even 500MHz, but had to settle for 480MHz in order for the board to make it to market on time. It’s here where things get a little interesting, as our pre-release engineering sample board shipped with a different cooling unit than the cooler that’s going to be used on shipping, retail All-In-Wonder X1900 cards. For shipping All-In-Wonder X1900 cards, ATI borrows the exact same cooler that was used on Radeon X1800 XL/All-In-Wonder X1800XL boards. In contrast, the heatsink on our board was actually a little bit smaller than the heatsink ATI uses on final All-In-Wonder X1900 cards, but the fan used on our All-In-Wonder X1900 board was larger and runs quieter. It’s because of this that we actually prefer the cooler used on our board, particularly for use on a multimedia card, as you’ll want your PC to run as quietly as possible when watching movies/TV on your PC.

Our guess (and we stress the word guess) is that ATI couldn’t squeeze the extra 20MHz out of the new All-In-Wonder X1900 cooling design, despite the use of a new heatsink/fan unit, so rather than use the smaller cooler they decided to stick with same cooler that’s been used on Radeon X1800 XL and All-In-Wonder X1800 XL cards in the past. After all, ATI’s probably got a ton of them lying around since the X1800 series cards are no longer in production. By sticking with the old cooler, it also allowed ATI to get the All-In-Wonder X1900 to market on launch day.

Again, this is all just a guess on our part, but it makes a lot of sense. The 20MHz deficit shouldn’t make much of a difference in performance anyway.

Closer shot of the two AIW boards

TV programming on the AIW X1900

Another interesting “guess” we made in our Radeon X1900 article last week is that today’s All-In-Wonder X1900 card may provide a preview of what’s to come with ATI’s vanilla Radeon X1900, if such a card were to be announced in the future. Remember, right now ATI’s only announced three Radeon X1900 products: the Radeon X1900 XT, Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire, and the Radeon X1900 XTX. As of right now, there is no Radeon X1900 card.

But just as ATI didn’t announce a vanilla Radeon 9700 on launch day when R300 was first introduced, only to eventually produce such a part just a few months later, we wouldn’t be surprised to see ATI announce a vanilla Radeon X1900 at some point in the near future. After all, now that the Radeon X1800 XL is no longer in production, ATI’s got a huge $300+ hole in their product lineup to fill between the Radeon X1600 XT and the Radeon X1900 XT. Because of this, we don’t think it’s unwise to guess that ATI may eventually want to produce a vanilla X1900 card. And with the All-In-Wonder X1900 sharing similar clock speeds as the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL, we can see exactly just how much of a performance improvement R580’s new 48-shader architecture brings!