|
Sapphire X700 Pro, Mainstream PCI-E Gaming Card |
|
Written by Mavke
|
|
Monday, 25 October 2004 |
Got|Apex has put up a review on the Sapphire Radeon X700 Pro graphics card. The X700 Pro is based off of the RV410 GPU that has half as many pipelines as the 16 pipe X800XT+. Furthermore, the X700 has a 128-bit memory interface, which is again, half as wide as the memory bandwidth that the X800 series provides. The advantage for ATI is that the X700 Pro retains the 6 vertex pipelines of the X800, while nVidia drops down to 4.
 Sapphire X700 Pro, Mainstream PCI-E Gaming Card
Since I didn't compare the X700 Pro to another card I can't definitively say that it outperformed anything else. Doing some side by side comparisons between my 9800XT 2.8GHz Northwood system I can definitely tell that
there is a difference, games were faster, but determining how much was due to the video card and how much to the processor/memory/PCI-E is impossible (which is why I didn't include it in the review). The card definitely provides some mainstream performance in today's games. It isn't super fast in D3, but turning down the detail a bit and getting some AA/AF in there gives you a decent picture
and a nice performance point.
The Sapphire bundle is usually pretty good and it has continued to be great with a couple games that aren't latest #1's, but will provide some entertainment. Now, there are some area's where I'd like to see Sapphire improve, such as adding a newer game into the bundle, but that would also increase the price. I might say that they shouldn't include anything at all and just take a bit of cash off the card, but adding some value is what they are there for. Otherwise the card worked as advertised, installed nicely and worked perfectly. Overclocking worked well and a user could probably pump some more out of the GPU.
It is unfortunate that I wasn't able to compare the card to another one. However, I just cannot honestly show X correlation to Y performance without tainting it with PCI-E/DDR2/Prescott differences. I think I have a line
on a motherboard that will be able to let me compare more accurately. It might just have to wait for another PCI-E card where I can show the difference. I can say that the card does provide a good balance between performance and price, it does what is advertised in giving a good gaming experience while not breaking the bank. The "feel" of the games was good and I would certainly recommend this
card at this point.
I would like to note that I had some problems when booting my system, the image would become unstable and flicker through, like a scrolling image. It would clear up once windows would boot. I am still tracking down what
the problem was. I also did note a few crashes with my system after I installed the Catalyst Control Center, so there might be some issues that will be resolved
once an update comes out. Neither of these issues effected game performance and I feel that they should not aversly effect on a gamers buying decision.
|
NiBiTor v6.06
