[Dave Baumann]

ATI have been busily churning out desktop graphics chips in 2005 to meet the changing market conditions and take advantage of process changes - the RV410, chip that powers the new line of Radeon X700 boards, is the fifth desktop chip out of a potential 8 in 2004. Unlike some of the chips that have been produced RV410 is a new configuration of performance and feature elements, with the features being drawn from the slightly more advanced R420 architecture, and performance elements from all over the place!

Ostensibly Radeon X700 is designed as a mainstream part, with the remit of bringing last years high end performance to mainstream prices, however rather than just taking onboard a Radeon 9800 configuration, X700 has only a 128-bit memory bus, 8 fragment / pixel pipelines, and 6 vertex shaders. In this review we take a closer look at the architecture, and put both a reference ATI X700 XT platform and a retail Sapphire Hybrid X700 PRO board to the test.

We put both these X700 boards under numerous tests to look at its architectural make-up and gaming, PCI Express and video decoding performance to see where their performance lies in relation to the rest of the "X" line and whether it exceeds the performance of the 9800 PRO. Read the full review here.

[Smurfie]

Are the X700s supported only on the 8.07 drivers?

[Dave Baumann]

Cat 4.10 (8.06) support them as well.

[Anonymous]

great review as always dave.

[horvendile]

Nitpick:

Originally Posted by DaveBaumann

Unlike some of the chips that have been produced RV40 is a new configuration

(Emphasis mine)

[Anonymous]

"We're using a custom Firing Squad benchmark here, that doesn't utilise any character as the benchmark does operate as the game would with other characters in the scene."

Difficult to understand this sentence is, hmmm?

--Yoda

Please clarify that temporal AA is totally different from "ATI TAA". And I missed some comment on the usefulness of the feature -- does it help visual quality? (It should, and then it deserves to be said!)

--Nitpicker

Great, thorough and insightful review as always!

--The rest

[Dave Baumann]

We're using a custom Firing Squad benchmark here, that doesn't utilise any character as the benchmark does operate as the game would with other characters in the scene."

Models don't "die" in the benchmark mode, you just end up walking right through them. We use a scene that only looks at the environment.

And I missed some comment on the usefulness of the feature -- does it help visual quality? (It should, and then it deserves to be said!)

Theres a link to the description of it in the X800 review.

[Anonymous]

Is that 199$ figure the official MSRP? That price was mentioned on the last page, but it wasn't completely clear to me.

Any word on AGP versions?

[bigz]

Originally Posted by Anonymous

Any word on AGP versions?

I doubt we'll see AGP versions until after X700 XT is available to the GP, it shouldn't be far away now I would have thought.

[Dave Baumann]

Originally Posted by Anonymous

Is that 199$ figure the official MSRP? That price was mentioned on the last page, but it wasn't completely clear to me.

Yes, the official ATI MSRP is $199 for 128MB X700 XT and $199 for 256MB X700 PRO. (Hint: Take a look at the top of page 1 of the review )

Originally Posted by bigz

I doubt we'll see AGP versions until after X700 XT is available to the GP, it shouldn't be far away now I would have thought.

We'll need Rialto as well though.

[Smurfie]

I'm seeing Sapphire X700Pros in Singapore right now. S$499 (S$1.65 to US$1). Might be worth a buy.

In contrast, the 6600GT is only S$399. :/
Both are PCI-e.

Edit: forgot to mention, it's the 256mb Sapphire X700Pro that is available here in Singapore. The 6600GT at S$399 is at 128mb.

[Bjorn]

Prices in Sweden are:

6600 128 Mb: 157€
6600 256 Mb: 184€
6600 GT 128 Mb: 255€
X700 Pro 128 Mb: 195€
X700 Pro 256 Mb: 250€

Both the vanilla 6600 and the 6600 GT are in stock, though a more expensive version of the 6600 GT, 309€. No X700 Pro's/X700XT. No price indications for the X700XT either.

[Anonymous]

Curious to know if you are using the same video samples for the CPU usage test in the x700 review as you did in 6600 review. It would be good to have some kind of reference point.

[Dave Baumann]

For video testing we've taken the 1080i T2 trailer from the MS WMV9 sample site for the WMV9 testing, and also converted that into both MPEG2 and DiVX for testing with those formats. These same files are used throughout all reviews in which we've conducted these tests and he platforms are the same between the X700 and 6600 reviews.

[Mintmaster]

Good review, Dave.

Your pixel shader scores for the 9800 seem way off, though.

From your Sapphire 9800 review (PS and PS2 scores are similar to the ATI 9800 review):
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/sapp.../index.php?p=6
1600x1200:
PS - 161.4
APS - 125.2
PS2 - 26.3

From your X700PRO review:
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/...index.php?p=11
1600x1200, 9800 PRO comparison score:
PS - 78.2
APS - 83.9
PS2 - 28.2 (okay, this is only 7% off)

You might want to correct that, and see if any other benchmarks were compromised by whatever caused this problem.

[noko]

Wow! ATI did a A+ job in getting X700XT performance and in many cases better performance with a 128bit bus over lasts years best. I can see why there is no AGP versions at this time because the X700 series would drop the 9800Pro series prices even more. I wonder if 9800Pro's are still even made?

Great review and really dissects the performance of ATI's new line well.

[Anonymous]

how 'bout an aiw x700 pro w/ the 256mb... and keep all the features of my aiw 9600 pro... and add in the theater 550 silicon... then i'm an upgrading foo'...