[Dave Baumann]

Launched in late 2004 ATI’s Radeon X700 Series was initially tasked to take over ATI’s mainstream performance board segment. However, soon after its announcement ATI cancelled the high end X700 XT configuration, to make way for the standard Radeon X800, leaving the X700 PRO as the highest performance configuration within the X700 line. Now that we are some way into the production of the boards there are many board vendor configurations available, and here we are looking at ABIT’s standard Radeon X700 PRO, the ABIT RX700 PRO-256PCIE.

Here we’ll take a look at the performance of the ABIT board comparing it against the reference Radeon X700 PRO and defunct XT configurations. Read the full review here.

[Rys]

Good conclusion which was very apt for the board, and was good to see you say.

My only quibble is with the page on RV410, where the very bottom section, where you discuss lineage, seems not to apply to that particular GPU, rather R430.

Otherwise spot on.

[Neeyik]

Originally Posted by Rys

My only quibble is with the page on RV410, where the very bottom section, where you discuss lineage, seems not to apply to that particular GPU, rather R430.

:? oooh, what's happened there? Oi Dave!

[bigz]

hmm, the bundle is pretty poor - exactly the same as the RX600 Pro-Guru... I'd expect a little more if they're going to compete with the likes of HighTech/Sapphire.

I'm also not quite sure why you included the X700 XT - it never turned up in retail, and when I questioned which OEMs had the card, I wasn't given an answer. It's a reviewers product only, and even then there are like two in the whole of the UK. :?

[Neeyik]

The XT was included because Abit themselves do one:

Fatal1ty X700-XT

Getting hold of one might be another thing altogether though

[Dave Baumann]

Originally Posted by Neeyik

:? oooh, what's happened there? Oi Dave!

Fixed.

[bigz]

Originally Posted by Neeyik

The XT was included because Abit themselves do one:

Fatal1ty X700-XT

Getting hold of one might be another thing altogether though

I thought that ABIT dropped that from their lineup totally.

I find it interesting that the linked video card has a 256MB frame buffer - ATI dropped that from their lineup before launch, despite it being in the press documents.

The inclusion seems fair enough though, I guess. :?

[Dave Baumann]

There are numerous configurations floating around that are greater that the PRO spec, all of which are the XT ASIC's (ABIT's example, Sapphire's Toxic PRO board is actually an XT ASIC) and you'll probably see these ones shipping with overclock utils to get them beyond PRO speeds (as they can't sell them out of the box like that).

However, even then, the inclusion of the XT spec is there to show what you can't actually buy and to highlight that the PRO is currently the highest specified X700 board there is and thats the performance differential to the XT spec that is no longer.

[bigz]

HighTech do something similar with their X700 Pro IceQ iTurbo.

[Neeyik]

Just a wee small update. We've had word from Abit that they're hoping to improve the package contents of several models, including the one that we've reviewed here. No firm details as to exactly what one could expect to see but still, it's better than nothing!