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Round Up and Comparison of X700 Pro graphics cards

PCI Express x16 graphics cards
Chipset X700 Pro 128/256 MB, 128 bit

Those wanting an affordable, all round great card with good shader performance will likely be pleased with the Radeon X700 Pro series. Even with the lack of AGP support and the absence of its premium part (the elusive Radeon X700 XT), Radeon X700 Pro continues to be one of the preferred choice for many gamers. Today, we test boards from three different manufacturers. In alphabetical order they are the ASUS Extreme AX700 Pro 256 MB, Gigabyte X700 Pro 256 MB and the MSI RX700 Pro TD128E.

Overview

The cards are pretty much the same, except for the amount of memory, video input / output accessories and cooling solutions. Before discussing benchmark results, we'd like to share our thoughts and notes on each card.

ASUS Extreme AX700 Pro TVD 256 MB
425/433 MHz

ATI Radeon X700 PRO, 256 MB DDR3
Core Clock : 425 MHz
Memory Clock : 430 MHz (860 MHz DDR3)

Overall Score: 85 points



Unfortunately, our review sample has made some rounds, so we're not completely sure if everything that was bundled with the card is still there. So, we're going to evaluate the bundle according to the information on the box: the ASUS Extreme AX700 Pro TVD 256 MB comes bundled with a DVI to analog bundle, a TV output / input dongle (S-video and composite / RCA) and the drivers / utilities CD. There's also a quick setup guide, that's really brief and quite frankly doesn't offer much information regarding hardware and software installation. You'd have to read the manual to find them, which is located inside the second CD in PDF format. Unfortunately, ASUS didn't supply the needed Adobe Acrobat software, you'll have to get them yourself. Small details, but come on ASUS!

There's no application and game bundle for this card, which is a real shame. Especially since the card came with video input. Something in the line of Cyberlink's PowerDirector or Intervideo's WinDVD Creator would've been nice. There's not even a DVD player software. As software goes, ASUS only provides the basic stuff: drivers and utilities.



Thankfully, their SmartDoctor utility is a great tool. With SmartDoctor, you can keep tabs of important information regarding the health of your graphics card, such as temperature, fan speed, voltages. It also allows setting your own alarms, letting you know when the a component goes above the set temperature. You could also set the alarm for fan speed, or even core, memory and PCI Express slot voltage . Kudos to ASUS for this utility and the card, not many manufacturers go the extra mile to include such a feature. You can say that this feature alone more than made up for the lack of software. You can get the software from somewhere else, but you can't put features like hardware monitoring by yourself (especially voltage monitoring for both the graphics chip, the memory and the PCI Express slot).

As for the card itself, ASUS engineers choose to retain the reference board design. The Rage Theater chip is used to handle video input, which is a given for any ATI Radeon based cards. Since the card has 256 MBs of memory, there are memory chips in the front and back. ASUS used a single cooling design to cool both the chip and the memory in front, but they neglected the memory in the back. Annoying but still 'fixable'. Both the memory and chip is covered with thermal paste, so heat transfer from these components to the heatsink should be optimal. The fan is not protected by a finger guard, so mind your fingers when installing this card. People often find themselves playing with the fans (intentionally or accidentally), which is not a good thing. A well placed finger guard should prevent this and might even be useful for stopping dust and other particles from clogging the fan's intake.

Gigabyte X700 Pro 256 MB
427/433 MHz

ATI Radeon X700 PRO, 256 MB DDR3
Core Clock : 425 MHz
Memory Clock : 430 MHz (860 MHz DDR3)

Overall Score: 82.5 points



First, let's start with the bundle. Gigabyte put some effort into the bundle: there's the obligatory DVI to analog dongle, a video input / output that includes HDTV output. For input, there's an S-Video and composite / RCA connector. They even put a double tape on the dongle so you could stick it to something. The manual is pretty complete, covering hardware and software installation, including utility and Catalyst Control Center usage, plus simple troubleshooting tips.



The game bundle itself is great: Joint Operations from Novalogic on a CD and Thief: Deadly Shadows from Ion Storm on DVD. They also include Cyberlink's PowerDVD and PowerDirector for DVD playback and video capture / editing. These apps should be enough for you to take advantage of the card's video input / output capabilities. Gigabyte is nice to enough to include a small utility with the card – VTuner 2. Unfortunately, many of the more interesting features such as temperature monitoring and fan control is absent. The only thing you could really do is set profiles to overclock the card.

You could see from the picture that this card is passively cooled. It uses a heatpipe to transfer heat from the front heatsink to the back. The passive heatsink covers both the chip and the memory in the front and back. While this means greater surface area for heat dissipation, you still need to be very careful with heat. Under load, the chip and memory combined produces quite a lot of heat. We ran this card with a fan blowing on it during our performance testing. After the tests are complete, we ran it again under Doom 3 (still the most stressful game we could find) without the fan. The result: it gets pretty hot and we saw VPU Recover kicking in quite a few times. Hardly ideal if you're going to use the card for gaming for hours on end. So, get yourself a low RPM, 8 cm fan to cool this card. It really needs it.

MSI RX700 Pro TD128E
425/433 MHz

ATI Radeon X700 PRO, 128 MB DDR3
Core Clock : 425 MHz
Memory Clock : 430 MHz (860 MHz DDR3)

Overall Score: 74.5 points



As the only 128 MBs card, this X700 Pro card from MSI may seem to be at a disadvantage, but it's really not that much different. There's a slight difference in performance compared to the 256 MBs cards, but not much (2 to 5 fps in average). The card comes with connectors and cables for TV output using S-Video and a DVI to analog dongle. There's no video input, since it doesn't use the Rage Theatre chip (sorry, the picture is of the card with video input). However, there's a version of this card with the chip, so you might want to get that one if video input is important to you.

This card has the most complete bundle. You'll find games like XIII and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time from Ubisoft plus applications such as WinDVD for DVD playback and WinDVD Ripper to rip your DVDs. There's also Restore It! and Virtual Drive from Farstone to make backup images of your hard drive and CD / DVD. Nice, but the latter two is probably more suitable for a motherboard's bundle than a graphics card's. This card has no hardware monitoring: this means no info on the temperature and voltage of the chip and memory, and no fan speed info / control either. You'll have to rely on internal monitoring done VPU Recover built into the Catalyst drivers.

MSI used the same, single cooling design for both the X700 and GeForce 6600 cards. The heatsink cools both the chip and the memory chips, with thermal paste on the chip to provide better heat transfer. The memory doesn't use any thermal compound, but none is needed. There's no finger guard on the fan, so again be careful not to touch or press on the fan while installing it.

Performance

Now for the performance evaluation. Since all these cards use the same reference design, they offer roughly the same level of performance. The Gigabyte X700 Pro 256 MB running at 427 MHz for the core and 433 MHz DDR for the memory is a hair faster than the ASUS EAX700Pro TVD 256 MB running at 425 MHz and 433 MHz DDR. The MSI RX700 Pro TD128E is the slower card, running at 420 MHz and 433 MHz DDR. So, you see, memory capacity is not the most important issue here.

We didn't experience any problems with any of the cards. Installation was smooth as you can get. Before looking at the test results, we encourage you to read our 'How We Evaluate' article so you understand how we conduct our test and benchmarks. More importantly, you will also see how each benchmarks react with our test setup. We only put the average, minimum and maximum fps in this evaluation to keep it brief, excluding the per second fps progress graph.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 'Newcastle' socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 5.4 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce system driver version 5.1 (motherboard supplied driver)
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit integrated (motherboard supplied driver)
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The results:

There's no surprise here, all cards are more than enough to push three digit frame rates with Call of Duty. With 4x FSAA and 16x AF, we could still maintain average frame rates above 100 in 1024x768. Higher resolution does impart a performance penalty, here we see the 256 MBs cards pull away a little bit, but still at most only 10 to 13 % faster. It's really safe to say that all of them (even the 128 MBs MSI RX700 Pro TD128E has more than enough processing power for 1024 x 768, 32 bit gaming, just right for their price.


With the shadow resolution set to 'High', all the boards barely have enough power to push this demo. Since Splinter Cell is shader heavy, memory capacity doesn't improve performance much here, although there's a slight difference. Even so, the differences between the boards are not significant (a difference of 5 %). The minimum fps is the same, so looks like we need to get a faster processor if we want to use the X700 Pro boards above 1024x768, 32 bit in Splinter Cell.


We could see that all boards are again quite evenly matched. We don't see that much difference between the cards until we hit 1600 x 1200, 32 bit. Under 4x AA and 16x AF, the situation is similar. Even the MSI RX700 Pro TD128E have just enough pixel processing power to push this game at 1600 x 1200, 32 bit under 4x AA and 16x AF. The ASUS EAX700 Pro 256 MB and Gigabyte X700 Pro 256 MB fares better, but not by much. Remember that the minimum fps is experienced on the starting lane (there are 22 cars in all). Most of the time, you're only be looking at two to three cars at most.


Again the same situation with Nascar. All boards can push the game at very comfortable frame rates up to 1600x1200, 32 bit. We're basically system limited here, so we need to turn on AA and AF to push these cards. Only under 1600x1200, 32 bit with 4x AA and 16x AF are we seeing a max 17 % performance difference between the cards. The MSI RX700 Pro TD128E is slightly slower, with minimum frame rates below 30 fps. The performance difference between the cards are more likely caused by speeds rather than capacity.

Conclusion:

In general, these cards are good enough for comfortable gaming on 1024x768, 32 bit with 4x AA and 16x AF. They barely have enough processing power for higher resolution gaming, but this is to be expected since these are mainstream graphics cards. For the next generation of games, these cards have just enough shader power, but don't expect to run them with AA and AF above 30 fps with full details. We can see that memory capacity is not an issue, since the performance limiting factor is bandwidth and speed. Using higher speeds (through overclocking) can provide higher fps, providing just enough power to pass the 30 fps mark.

Since the performance is generally the same for all cards, features and bundle will be the determining factor for most people. For those with a tight budget, we recommend choosing the MSI RX700 Pro. The price is just right, it has enough processing power (the performance difference is not significant) and the bundle is more geared for gamers (no video input, no HDTV output, two full games). You don't get hardware monitoring, but the card should run fine without it.

Those who want more features will be considering either the Gigabyte X700 Pro or ASUS Extreme X700 Pro. The Gigabyte X700 Pro offers more in bundles (games, HDTV output) not to mention silent running, but we couldn't recommend this card to non-experienced users. With no fan, this card gets too hot, so you still have to use a fan. Gigabyte also didn't include hardware monitoring functions, which we feel should have been included to monitor the card's health (especially since it only relies on passive cooling).

The ASUS Extreme X700 Pro offers what the others don't have: full hardware monitoring for temperatures, voltages plus fan control. This feature is quite rare and can be very useful if you're planning to overclock the card. While this feature is important, you have to consider the lack of bundle and heatsinks for the memory on the back of the card. Both can be had for a little extra effort but we think ASUS should've bundled them. Having 256 MBs is nice, although it doesn't influence performance. There's also video input (sans HDTV output) courtesy of the Rage Theater chip. We recommend this card for those who want more out of the X700 Pro.

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