The Radeon X700 can be considered a mainstream product as the average card carries a sub $200 US price tag. Though this may not be as affordable as say the X300 series, these are certainly mid-range performance products. 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 have virtually ended all Radeon X600 graphics cards, leaving them for dead of a performance vs. price ratio. However, the Radeon X600XT is not the Radeon X700 Pro's source of competition, the mighty GeForce 6600 GT on the other hand is.
However, when the Radeon X700 series first came to light there were two models announced. This was the Radeon X700 XT, initially said to be for gamers and the Radeon X700 Pro designed for gaming as well as a range of other multimedia applications. ATi suggested that both these products would share similar price tags. The XT version would feature higher clock frequencies were as the Pro would have exclusive support for 256MB memory. Though as it now stands the Radeon X700 XT has been scrapped. The Radeon X700 Pro is the only new mid-range product ATi now offers and it comes in both 128MB and 256MB variants.
Since the Radeon X700 Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro easily out muscles the Radeon X600XT with double the pixel pipelines.
As mentioned earlier the clock frequencies have also been wound down, reducing the cards memory bandwidth. However, Radeon X700 Pro does utilize GDDR3 on a 128-bit memory bus in either 128 or 256MB configurations. The Radeon X700 Pro features a core clock of just 425MHz and a memory clock of 864MHz. This is significantly less than the GeForce 6600 GT which features the same amount of pixel pipelines. The GeForce 6600 GT on the other hand boasts a core frequency of 500MHz and a memory clock of 1GHz.
The ASUS Extreme AX700PRO/TVD is equipped with numerous exclusive ASUS innovations and is of course a "true" PCI-Express solution. This ASUS graphics card incorporates various innovative technologies, such as ASUS GameFace Live, ASUS VideoSecurity Online, ASUS SmartDoctor, ATI's SmartShader, and SmoothVision. ASUS Extreme AX700PRO/TVD is a complete solution featuring 256MB of onboard GDDR3 memory and the ATi Rage Theater chip. The ASUS Extreme AX700PRO/TVD looks to be a fairly expensive Radeon X700 Pro solution, though the extra features may justify the additional cost.
ASUS WL-530g Pocket Wireless Router (2005-02-15)