Gigabyte X700 Pro 256 MB
427/433 MHz
ATI Radeon X700 PRO, 256 MB DDR3Core 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 DDR3Core 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.
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