Conclusion

The X700 XT appears to be pushing the RV410 core somewhat closer to it limits, however the board we had appeared not to display any issues. The worst factor of the board is that of the fan ATI have used on this revision - while it may not be hugely loud, although it was certainly noticeable on this test system (albeit in an open box environment), the speed stepping makes it a little more noticeable. It might be worthwhile waiting to see what partner vendors do with the cooling on their X700 XT versions.

As far Sapphire's Hybrid Radeon X700 PRO offering is concerned we can see that this is another high quality product from them, with a reasonably comprehensive bundle. The board will probably set itself apart from many of the others in the pack, and the inclusion of heat-sinks on the RAM is a nice addition - it would certainly be a bonus if a reasonable number of boards could attain the high memory overclocking rates that we achieved in our testing.

Looking at the performance of the X700 XT and PRO we can see that, although the gap is narrowed, there is still a fairly large performance gap to the very high end, however the prices of the X700's are less than half the $500 glory boards, whilst the performance is often not quite half, at least in the case of the X700 XT. Although the X600 XT hasn't been here that long, its configuration with 9600 PRO and XT has been around in the mainstream for about 18 months and its welcoming to see something more potent on ATI's range to fill the $199 price slot as the X600 XT did previously. In fact, now that the X700 is here and proves that ATI can get fairly high performance 110nm cores we wonder if this might phase out the RV380 chip fairly soon with higher performance RV370 chips taking over the low end X600 positions (as ATI have done with the All-In-Wonder X600) and the X600 XT SKU giving way to X700 based products.

If one of X700's goals was to bring last years high end performance down to a mainstream price then, for the most part they've succeeded with the X700 XT outperforming the 9800 PRO in most graphics limited cases, and the X700 PRO being close in most tests. Thanks to the much increased vertex shader rates and slightly higher fill-rates, hence pixel shader power, due to the increased clockspeeds, the X700XT and PRO should always have the upper hand in non-bandwidth limited cases. In the tests used here we did see that the X700 XT managed to outperform the 9800 PRO even in high bandwidth situations, and we suspect that this is down to the texture filtering optimisations present in X700 which will not only assist in texture performance critical operations but can also assist by reducing bandwidth from a lower use of multiple mip-maps which will require bandwidth when there is insufficient texture cache.

With the X700 PRO and XT ATI have offered a curious choice for end users with the X700 PRO at 256MB available for the same price as the X700 XT at 128MB. Extra RAM isn't really about outright performance, but more about maintaining the maximum potential performance in applications / situations where lots of RAM is required. At this juncture its somewhat of a close call as to what's best in this segment. In the game tests we had here you can see that there aren't many titles that you will loose much performance on without 256MB, and the main cases where this happens was at 1600x1200 with 4x FSAA enabled - arguably, though, the performance of these boards may not be sufficient for those conditions anyway. Of course, as detail creeps up in later titles, as we are beginning to see a little with Doom3 and the Source Video Stress Test, 256MB may start to become more of a requirement in the future.