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Introduction

PCI Express has gotten a lot more interesting with the entire lot of chipset manufacturers priming to release PCIe chipsets on the Athlon 64 side in the very short near term with the announcements of the nForce 4 from NVIDIA and the K8T890 from VIA. While the high end of the market is always very enticing especially with boards like the X800s and the 6800s, one of the most popular segments in any given generation of video cards is the 200$ price point which has gone from the high end in the GeForce 2 days to the middle of the road enthusiast solution today.

The 200$ price point allows for quite a few choices including the X700 XT, the X700 PRO and the 6600GT. The 6600GT and X700XT will be the no compromise solution as far as frame rates go with a faster core and faster memory. The X700 PRO is an interesting compromise; more memory but a slower core and memory clock for the same price. Memory size is something that cannot be discounted any longer as DOOM 3 has already shown, memory size is starting to matter when next generation games come out. The alternative is a sacrifice has to be made in terms of image quality. The X700 Pro, unlike the XT and the GT offers 256MB of memory by default.

Today we take a look at PowerColor's implementation of the X700 Pro that is a part of their GameFX Board series of cards. PowerColor originally produced cards from several companies but decided to go strictly with ATI in 2002 and today remains one of a handful of companies that strictly produce ATI cards only alongside such brands as Sapphire and VisionTek.

Specifications

The PowerColor X700 Pro plays second fiddle to only the X700XT in the midrange department. Theoretical fillrate is slightly higher than last year's top of the line 9800XT but gives up the memory bandwidth advantage along with all the other cards that have a 128-bit memory interface. The X700 series that replaces the X600 series is a significant step up; whereas the X600 was more or less equivalent to the 9600XT, the X700 series is more akin to the 9700/9800 Pro and XT.