Date:
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Sapphire Radeon X700 PRO

We take our first look at a retail ATI Radeon X700 PRO video card and compare it directly to what the competition has to offer. Will one trounce the other, or do both offer an equal gameplay experience?

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System Test Setup:

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4), AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro TwinX Dual Channel DDR400 Cas2, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

For our system platform setups, we used the new ASUS A8N-SLI PCI Express platform with an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU at default speeds.

Sapphire Radeon X700 PRO 256MB PCI-E – We tested the Sapphire X700 PRO at default speeds, which are 425MHz / 864MHz. We used Catalyst 4.12 with CCC at the default settings with VSYNC disabled.

NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB PCI-E – For comparison, we used a reference NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB video card at default speeds of 500MHz / 1GHz. We used version 67.03 of NVIDIA’s ForceWare beta drivers.

NVIDIA GeForce 6600 128MB PCI-E – Also for comparison, we used a reference NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB video card and downclocked it to non-GT, regular 6600 speeds. To do this, the core was set at 300MHz and the memory at 550MHz. Again, we used version 67.03 of NVIDIA’s ForceWare beta drivers.

Game Evaluation Setup

Please be aware that we test our video cards a bit different from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real world gameplay that each video card provides. Gameplay includes performance and image quality evaluation. We have two sections, “Highest Playable” and “Apples to Apples.” The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. Following the Highest Playable section, we have a brief Apples to Apples performance section for those that find benefit of framerates with matching IQ. We use a high performance system with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.