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Nvidia vs ATI Midrange PCIe GPU Comparison
[Abstract]
The New Cards On The PCIe BlockWith the availability of NVIDIA's nForce4 Media Communication Processor (MCP), the third generation I/O interface (PCI Express bus) has finally arrived on the AMD...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
A Quick Look At The RADEON X700 PRO
Unfortunately for the RADEON X700 PRO, its cooler isn't quite as optimally designed as that of the XT variant and is a little audible during operation (though thankfully it isn't obtrusive). Firstly, the cooler is made of thick aluminum and doesn't have any copper insert to help improve heat conduction. Secondly the embedded fan is a small 35mm fan as opposed to the 40mm impeller unit on the XT's cooler and as a result, it does rev a little faster (and consequently contributing to noise).
Another design aspect that we do not favor is the cooler overshadowing the memory parts, but it does not cool them. We painted this scenario clearly in our Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP review where we scrutinized NVIDIA's default cooler on their reference card in this same situation. However, the RADEON X700 PRO operates its RAM parts at much lower speeds than the XT edition, so we didn't encounter very high memory temperatures. Still, temperatures could have been lower had the cooler design not 'blocked' the memory chips.
The RADEON X700 PRO up front. Notice that the RAM chips were well hidden beneath the cooler, but it doesn't cool them. |
This is the rear of the cooler unit. |
Four memory chips are located on the front while four more are located on the rear side as shown here. These eight memory chips give the card a combined frame buffer size of 256MB ?a standard size for most RADEON X700 PRO graphics cards. |
The ATI card had 2ns Samsung GDDR3 memory chips, which are far more than adequate for its default 860MHz DDR operation. |
Another shot of the ATI RADEON X700 PRO graphics card. |
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