ATI Radeon X700 Pro Roundup --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Overclocking - Part 1

What Happened Of The RADEON X700 XT?

Before we embark on the overclocking capability of the cards, let us take a moment to discuss about the mysterious RADEON X700 XT part, which hardly made its presence in retail and more often than not, only seemed to have existed in reviews around the world. So what does this information have anything to do with overclocking? You'll find out soon enough. In the pursuit of finding out the faith of that SKU, we peered under the hood of all the RADEON X700 PRO cards in the shootout and surprisingly, every one of them sported a RADEON X700 XT VPU such as this shot of the ABIT card without its cooler:-

Unexpectedly, we found every card in the shootout to bear a RADEON X700 XT VPU such as this photo shot taken of the ABIT card.

If you sum up this observation and the inadequate supply (or the lack of any) RADEON X700 XT graphics cards, you'll realize that ATI just wasn't able to scale this VPU as well as they had planned initially. The X700 part after all was ATI's first midrange graphics chip manufactured on the newer 0.11-micron process after they introduced this process first on the low end X300 series. There's a reason why ATI's high-end parts are mostly based on the 0.13-micron manufacturing process and that's simply because the yields are excellent and both ATI and TSMC have become well attuned to it. Here's yet another hint from GeCube's card that most RADEON X700 PRO cards are actually using clocked down XT cores:-

The PCB of the GeCube card points to a RADEON X700 XT product, but the card operates at lower frequencies and has been passed off as a RADEON X700 PRO product. Its cooler is the only other clue of its XT heritage.

So that wraps up any queries on RADEON X700 XT and our findings with regards to the RADEON X700 PRO graphics cards only relate that you can't expect fantastic overclocking, but you can still tweak them decently. For one, the memory parts are rated far higher than the intended operating speed, so there's quite a bit of headroom there for most cards.



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