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Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X700 PRO Review |
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Written by JRd1st
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Wednesday, 20 October 2004 |
From FiringSquad we get a
review of the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X700 Pro, ATI's answer to the nVidia 6600 series. With the arrival of
Fall, you'd probably expect things to cool down a bit, but actually the opposite
has happened as both ATI and nVidia have introduced new
mainstream graphics cards: from ATI comes the Radeon X700 family, while nVidia counters with their
GeForce 6600 series. Both of these cards incorporate technology from their
flagship $500 graphics cards, only they cost significantly less, about $200 in
the case of the mainstream cards we've looked at so far.
 Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X700 PRO Review
When ATI introduced the
Radeon 9600 XT a year ago, many gamers were hoping for a card that would replace
the Radeon 9700. Instead what they got was a card that barely displaced the
Radeon 9500 PRO. This was good enough to deliver performance comparable to other
cards in the mainstream segment, but not nearly enough to inspire a strong buzz
among the gaming community. Instead the outcry from enthusiasts was related to
the Radeon 9600 XT's memory subsystem, which was unchanged from the Radeon 9600
PRO.
Fortunately, with Radeon X700, ATI has gotten the message: the Sapphire
Hybrid Radeon X700 Pro board we tested today is not only capable of
outgunning a Radeon 9700 PRO, it also outperforms ATI's Radeon 9800 XT in some cases. This is truly a
revolutionary upgrade in mainstream performance.
Sapphire takes this solid
base and builds on it with their Hybrid Radeon X700 PRO card. Our board shipped
with a 256MB memory configuration, the larger frame buffer ensures that the VPU
is never starving for data, a case which we've seen can occur in cutting edge
titles Far Cry and Half-Life 2 VST/CS: Source in
the past (although in FC the X700 XT still managed to pull ahead of the X700 PRO
at all test settings except 1600x1200 with 4xAA). In Call of Duty with the detail
settings cranked all the way up to their maximums we saw the extra memory found
in the Sapphire Hybrid X700 PRO helped it to pull ahead of the reference Radeon
X700 XT card, which was only equipped with 128MB of memory. Keep in mind that Call of Duty is a derivative
of the five-year old Quake
3 engine.
In other words, if you can spare the extra money, we
highly recommend that going forward you opt for a 256MB graphics card.Sapphire also includes a
good software bundle featuring games that are fairly current and have received
favorable reviews. Checking out EBGames, Price of Persia sells for $20, while
Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is currently priced at $30. This means that Sapphire is giving you $50 worth of games for free.
Finally, Sapphire provides all the hardware accessories you'll need, and the board ships with good
cooling. VIVO isn't included, but with nearly all motherboards shipping with Firewire connections, most home video enthusiasts are using Firewire or USB to
transfer their home movies anyway.
Sapphire's got all their bases covered
with the Hybrid Radeon X700 PRO 256MB. You've got a card that delivers solid performance, runs quietly and with low temps (making it a tempting solution for small form factor applications), ships with a couple of games you may not have checked out yet, and does all this at a price point. If you're currently gaming on an old GeForce4 or Radeon 8500 card (or older) and looking for more performance, Sapphire's Hybrid Radeon X700 PRO is definitely worthy of consideration.
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ASUS 8800GT PCIe 512MB - Rev 04
