As we all know and as I've been preaching for a while now we see the living room entertainment coming to the PC more and more in a very fast fashion. One of the most popular thing we've noticed here in Europe has to be HDTV and everything related to it. The trend started last year already and hey even yours truly bought a HDTV recently (Ed: and yet he claims he can't pay me =P). It's coming fast and quite frankly, thank God for that as watching content in HD is simply fantastic. So how does that relate to graphics cards? In more ways then you think, just look at the latest trend of HTPC's, Home Theater PC's. Things like Media Center PC's here and there? Do you get where I'm going with this?

Yes exactly this kind of thing is what I am talking about. This is the future of media playback and the PC is going to play a very important role in that. Since it´s a PC you probably want a graphics card in there that can support all the cool and extensive features. So media playback and decoding is a process that can, is and will be moved towards the graphics card. Both NVIDIA and ATI already had excellent implementation of it. ATI just took it onto a next level though. With exactly this kind of stuff in mind they introduced the new AVIVO feature.

Avivo will be an integral component in all of ATI´s upcoming desktop, mobile, chipset, workstation, and software products. As stated Media Center PC are getting really popular. TV is going digital and HD/HD2(?) Blu-ray and HD-DVD are coming. Digital photograpphy is everywhere. AVIVO is a video and display platform that perfects the video quaility. AVIVO will be integral in all future ATI products. Vibrant high fidelity images and video.

Smooth vivid playback. Flawless playback for both SD and HD televison that's what this stuff is intended for from a decoding point of view. With two dual link DVI ports which are supported on the entire X1000 range  two High def sceens can be conected. This is something we will be testing in the near future actually.

Look... it's a CrossFire

A small word on Crossfire then, I just have to do that. Roughly a week and a half ago Crossfire finally was officially released... (where are the promised products in the shops right now?) Quite honestly it might have been a better idea to delay that release even further for a couple of weeks as the professional press clearly and most of all fair way called ATI upon some issues. The biggest being a limitation of gaming in a maximum resolution of 1600x1200 at 60 Hz. For most of us not at all an issue but with HD gaming around the corner and all kinds of new HD screens that simply is not the best way of presenting your products; if you want to be the leader on this industry. ATI had to work with existing products, which resulted into product limitations. "We can do whatever NVIDIA is doing" did not exactly go the way ATI wanted it to. The new generation however allows exactly what ATI has in mind for Crossfire and has a far better chance in succeeding over the previous generation products.

The new CrossFire X1000 series from top to bottom is Crossfire compatible. On this series though the nasty limitation is gone as all cards and DVI connectors are able to handle Dual-Link DVI. So for example if you have two lovely screens at 1920x1200 it'll just work fine. New on the X1000 series is a programmable compositing engine which is software upgradeable. So you can get very high resolution gaming with the new series. This goes for the entire X1 series. It'll not be cheap for the high-end segment though as i thin a primary card in the form of the X1800 XT will cost you 599 USD (I remember that price from a slide I saw and can't seem to find back).

But the dual card setup definitely is looking good for the new line-up. We'll just have to wait, see and most of all test.

Excuse Me, but Watt Did You Say?


With the ongoing trend in an increased power consumption of computer hardware (and this is really worrying) we will check a statement that ATI made about power consumption to us. They stated that the X520 XT would max out at 100 Watts. That's similar to NVIDIA's High-end cards. So that would keep the power draw below 300 Watts for our test system.

We simply look at the peak Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify those claims.

Of course we do what we always do with new graphics' cards, we monitor the overall wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall consumption of the PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU. I understand it's not the most reliable method, but it's a darn good indication !

In 3DMark05 the Athlon 4000+, 1 GB, DVD-rom, NFORCE4 based test platform shows a maximum peak use of 229 Watts for the X1800 XL ... that's fantastic. Let's have a look at my findings: