Date:
Friday , May 27, 2005
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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PowerColor Bravo X700 256MB Review

We’ve got a retail PowerColor RADEON X700 256MB based video card for review today. Read inside to see which card is actually better for gaming, a 256MB PowerColor X700 or a 128MB GeForce 6600. This should prove to be interesting…

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System Test Setup:

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 3500+

Motherboard

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

System Memory

2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro

Hard Drive

Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150

OS

Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c

For our midrange video card testing setup, we are using the nForce4 PCI-Express Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 3500.

Video Card Details:

Make & Model

Platform

Core Clock (MHz)

Memory Clock (MHz)

Driver Version

Notes

PowerColor Bravo X700

PCIe

400

266 (532 DDR)

Catalyst 5.4

WHQL Drivers

NVIDIA GeForce 6600

PCIe

300

275 (550 DDR)

ForceWare 71.89

WHQL Drivers

To compare the X700’s performance to the competition, we downclocked a GeForce 6600 GT 128MB video card to non-GT speeds, which are 300 MHz core and 550 MHz DDR.

Game Evaluation Setup

Please be aware 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 frame rates with matching IQ. We use a high performance system with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.