Date: December 24th, 2004
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product Submitted by: ATI
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VIDEOCARD PICTORIAL & WALKTHROUGH

First you will notice is ATI's PCB color change. Moving away from the standard bland green PCB, ATI has chosen to go with the dark purple variety. Some people may think "Meh, who cares?". But to those with a windowed case, it will look a lot better than a standard color videocard. Even the metal parts are upgraded to a gold color. I gave it a nibble and at isn't real gold. *Runs to the Dentist*

As I have stated in previous computer product reviews, aesthetics are starting to play a bigger role in purchases and younger consumers want a product that looks as good as it performs.

Seeing the separate input and output dongle have been condensed to one adapter, there is now room for dual monitor support. Although I do respect this, I still would have liked to have seen Dual DVI connectors rather than one of each. With Dual DVI, you still have the choice of running dual DVI or even dual Analog VGA with the appropriate adapters. Now, another thing to bring up is the fact that there is not DVI to VGA adapter included so even if you would like to run a dual analog VGA setup, you will have to go and purchase the adapter separately. These small things tend to frustrate consumers a bit although they are not a huge concern to most of the targeted user base.

Here is just a closer look at the new single main dongle connection which takes care of all the multimedia input and output from camcorder recording to cable TV viewing. For such a small connection, it sure handles a lot of information throughput. Make sure the dongle is fastened properly and screwed into place. These small connection will not be able to handle much abuse before they are ruined.

Another thing to note is just how small the RF modulator handling the cable TV reception has become. It is literally half the size of the modulator contained on the older videocards to date.

Cooling the X600 pro VPU core is this small yet efficient gold colored cooler. With a larger surface area dedicated to the core alone, a large noisy fan is just not needed. This cooler does an exceptional job at keeping the core cool and definitely helps in the core overclocking department. What the cooler does not do is cool the memory and actually blocks the top four 32 meg modules from getting any decent air flow at all. This will definitely lead to some memory overclocking problems.

If you turn the videocard over you will see that the back modules also are not passively cooled by any heatsinks. Overclocking without proper cooling always leads to problems and as you will see in the next section, this did lead to some memory overclocking problems with this card.

The All in Wonder x600 pro is equipped with eight 32meg 128bit DDR modules (Total: 256Megs) of onboard Hynix memory rated at 3.3ns. With that latency, the theoretical overclocking ceiling is set right at the stock clock rate of 300Mhz (600Mhz DDR). One thing that I definitely like is the doubling of the onboard texture memory. What I don't like is the reduction in memory latency.

Now why ATI decided to move away from the 2.8ns Samsung memory modules seen throughout their All in Wonder line is beyond me, but the grape vine has told me that the Samsung memory modules are starting to become a little harder to find in mass quantities needed for a high volume mainstream market which this product is targeted towards.

With a lack of cooling and a lack of overclocking headroom, the memory overclock should be pretty poor and as you will see in the next section, it is just that.