Video processing hardware

One of the key ingredients to the All-In-Wonder X1900’s multimedia functionality is the Microtune 2121 chip. The 2121 is responsible for providing the All-In-Wonder X1900’s TV and FM tuning functions. Microtune’s 2121 is a silicon-based tuner, if you recall, older All-In-Wonder products used an analog tuner manufactured by Philips.

The Philips tuner was a great performer with excellent image quality, but it took up an enormous amount of space on the card. ATI’s engineers literally had to clear the entire upper half of the board’s PCB in order to fit the Philips tuner onto the card. Another downside to the old Philips tuner was that it consumed about 11% more power. ATI’s first stab at replacing the Philips tuner was Microtune’s MT2050 ASIC. The MT2050 provided crystal clear video quality, but the downside to MT2050 was its performance: changing channels with the MT2050 was considerably slower than the old Philips tuner, which was quite responsive.

Fortunately ATI was quick to respond, shelving the MT2050 in favor of the MT 2121. The MT2121 boasts the same image quality, power and space savings as its predecessor, only now it’s much more responsive. Whereas channel changing was a 2.5-3.0 second ordeal with MT2050, switching channels is now down to about 1.0-1.5 seconds based on our seat-of-the-pants testing. This is really evident when switching channels rapidly, or when using the All-In-Wonder X1900’s channel surf feature, which we’ll discuss in more depth later.

I wonder what that red laser pointer is?

That is going to hurt if it hits

They are in trouble

Real trouble!

Theater 200

ATI’s battle-tested Theater 200 chip makes a return once again on the All-In-Wonder X1900. The Theater 200 performs all video decoding duties on the All-In-Wonder X1900, and has been used on all of ATI’s multimedia products dating back to the All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro four years ago. The Theater 200 chip receives the signals from the Microtune tuner chip (or whatever device is connected through the component or S-Video inputs), 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.

Despite all this, some critics have noted that Theater 200 is beginning to show signs of age. ATI’s newer Theater 550 Pro boasts a new motion adaptive 3D comb filter as well as a more advanced 5-Line 2D comb filter, two more lines than used in THEATER 200. Most notably though is Theater 550 Pro’s built-in MPEG-2 encoder.

AIW X1900 is much larger than this Radeon X800 XL card

With all that being said though, 200 is still one of the best video decoders on the market. Last year in our ATI Theater 550 Pro card roundup, we noted that while Theater 550 Pro dished out better visuals than Theater 200, the difference in image quality between the two wasn’t as astounding as you’d think. Considering that ATI pairs Theater 550 Pro with 16MB of additional memory, we can see why they’ve been slow to integrate the chip into their All-In-Wonder line.