The battle for customers is raging in the performance-mainstream segment of the graphics cards market. Some manufacturers offer outstanding bundle, others - silent fanless cooling and fancy design. In case you clearly decided to that what you need is something based on ATI RADEON X700 PRO graphics chip, but cannot settle on particular product, you should probably check out the reviews of those graphics cards, we picked up some for you.

France-based web-site PC INpact has reviewed six ATI RADEON X700 PRO-based graphics cards from ASUS, GeCube, MediaMax, MSI, PowerColor and Sapphire. All of those cards have a bit different bundles, connectivity and some have only 128MB of memory.

?I can only advise you to invest in X700 PRO with 256MB of memory. Like it could be seen from various benchmark results, additional 128 MB have their importance in demanding games like Half-Life 2 and Far Cry, in case FSAA and anisotropic filtering are activated, or in high resolutions,?PC INpact concludes.

Canada-based web-site Rage3D has also managed to review a couple of ATI RADEON X700 PRO products: from HIS and Sapphire Technology.

?By my count, the [HIS X700 PRO] IceQ Turbo comes out ahead in 4 of the 10 tests I ran, with the [NVIDIA GeForce] 6600 GT performing faster on the other 6 tests. The IceQ Turbo holds commanding leads in the Half-Life 2, Richard Burn's Rally and, to a lesser extent, the Pacific Fighters tests. The Pacific Fighters results are somewhat surprising considering NVIDIA's traditional dominance in everything OpenGL (as you can see by the other OpenGL tests). 3DMark05 rounds out the performance advantages for the IceQ Turbo. The widest margins for the 6600GT came with Doom III, where it unsurprisingly holds a huge lead in all the results. Call of Duty, Chronicles of Riddick, and Far Cry also seem to perform best on the 6600 GT in these tests,?reports Rage3D.

?The Sapphire RADEON X700 PRO Toxic card performs very respectably in a lot of ways. Even with only half the amount of memory it manages to keep up to the other X700 PROs in most tests. It's really too bad though that there's only 128MB memory because we?re at a point in time when the need for 256MB with some games is becoming very real, particularly when Anti-Aliasing is used and in cases such as with Half-Life 2 and Far Cry, even without Anti-Aliasing. There's just not enough room in there to hold all that data and performance suffers greatly because of it,?says Rage3D.

• PC INpact: RADEON X700 PRO Roundup (in English).
• PC INpact: Six Cartes Graphiques RADEON X700 PRO (in French).
• Rage3D: HIS X700 PRO IceQ Turbo Review.
• Rage3D: Sapphire Toxic X700 PRO Review.