We left Nathan Davis in the middle of the road, to see what would happen.
Like the X700 XT, the X700 Pro has 128-bit GDDR3 memory, eight pixel pipelines, six vertex pipelines and runs on PCI-Express with x16 native lane support. The only aspect that ATI has changed is the core and memory frequencies, both of which run at 425MHz and an effective 860MHz, respectively. A significant drop, particularly for the memory.
Speaking of which, ATI are continuing a bizarre trend. If a cheaper edition of a card is to be made – which usually means it will be slower, as is the case here – why throw more memory on it? 256MB isn't going to be used greatly as of yet anyway and as it's BGA, this bumps the price up. Unless they're preying on the gits who think that memory is everything. And black computer cases are faster.
It looks like this is the final cooling design for the X700 series. Luckily the Pro edition doesn't reach such screaming levels as does the X700 XT with its autoadjusting speed levels. That said, this is still quite loud for a slower midrange card.
The scores we pulled are directly relevant to the X700 XT results (and last month's 6600GT preview). It's a Pentium 4 EE 3.4GHz with 2GB DDR2 all packed on a i925X based motherboard. It falls consistently below the X700 XT except in Far Cry which surprisingly spurted out 48.21fps in our Bunker test. This is practically identical to the X700 XT, all thanks to Far Cry's use of the programmable pipelines. It drew up 6383 3DMarks in 3DMark03 and 32.9fps in Doom 3 at 1280 x 1024.
This card came equipped with an obligatory copy of Hitman: Contracts. If that's enough to get you swinging to a new PCI Express setup, we won't stop you. It's a free country.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012