The Radeon X700 series can be considered a mainstream product as it carries a sub $200 US price tag. Though they may not be as mainstream as say the X300 series, these are certainly mid-range performance products. With the typical price of a Radeon X700 being $200 US or less, they certainly offer an exceptional bang for your buck factor. This new Radeon X700 series will virtually end all X600 graphics cards, leaving them for dead of a performance vs. price ratio.
Since the Radeon X700 is still built on the RV410 GPU using a 0.11-micron process, it has all the basic core features of the X800. Furthermore the X700 supports all the latest Radeon features such as SmoothVision HD, VideoShader HD and HyperZ HD. The pixel pipelines have been cut down from 12 of the Radeon X800 Pro to 8. However, even with 8 the Radeon X700 easily out muscles the X600 series with double the pixel pipelines.
As mentioned earlier the clock frequencies have also been wound down, reducing the cards memory bandwidth. However, Radeon X700 does utilize GDDR3 on a 128-bit memory bus in either 128 or 256MB configurations. Now apparently the Radeon X700 Pro cards will be fitted with 256MB of memory while the X700XT cards get just 128MB. This will actually make the price difference negligible between the two, yet the Radeon X700XT will still be faster.
This is due to the Radeon X700XT featuring higher memory and core clock frequencies. The card will feature a 475MHz core and a 1.05GHz DDR memory frequency. This is opposed to the Radeon X700 Pro which features a core clock of just 425MHz and a memory clock of 864MHz. However, the Radeon X700XT has been difficult to track down and therefore consumers have been turning to the far more popular Radeon X800 Pro.
The Radeon X700XT is intended to be used mainly for gaming and is designed to compete with the GeForce 6600GT. The X700 Pro is more of a general purpose graphics card which can be used for gaming, video editing and home multimedia. The Radeon X700 Pro will be the focus of today's review as HIS are now delivering these graphics cards to the market. The HIS Radeon X700 Pro differs a little from the competition, making it a more exciting and unique product.
Today's Radeon X700 Pro review item features a very elaborate cooling design known as IceQ Turbo. Many manufacturers have fitted their Radeon X700 Pro graphics cards with unique cooling setups. For example Gigabyte has been enforcing their no-fan solutions which utilize heatpipe technology. This design method is great as it operates with absolute silence and can cool quite effectively. However, while the heatpipe designs do look impressive, the aesthetics of this HIS product will be hard to beat.
HIS Excalibur Radeon X700 Pro IceQ Turbo VIVO Review (今 06:16)