ATI Technologies provides new graphical solutions, which pretend to achieve the superiority in the multi-media hardware industry all over the world. The ATI Radeon X700 video card is a new item that proposes more to advanced users.
Video cards producers all over the world provide their products on the base of ATI chips. The example is the Sapphire Radeon X700. The card has the interface PCI-Express 16x, 256 MB GDDR3 SDRAM in eight micro-chips. The memory micro-chips are produced by the Samsung Corporation. The access time is 2.0 ns according to the clock 500 (1000) MHz. The memory works with the clock 430 (860) MHz. The GPU clock is 425 MHz. The memory bus width is 128bit. There are eight pixel conveyors and six top conveyors.
Actually, the ATI Radeon X700 is almost the same model as the X700 XT. However, this video card has a decreased clocking. There are no differences in the PCB design. An azure color of textolite is the only reason to demonstrate the origin from Sapphire factories, since their management has recently decided to use blue colors for their video cards.
The ATI Radeon X700 has a place for the RAGE Theater. Therefore, these products can have ViVo. A cooling system of Sapphire modification for the ATI Radeon X700 is very simple. It is only a usual radiator with a cooler in the center. The cooler has very high rpm values and produces comparatively much noise. This disadvantage can be fixed by a new version of the RivaTuner utility. This software is able to control the cooler's rpm and they can be set to an optimal level.
A box with the ATI Radeon X700 contains a user's manual, a disk with drivers, software from Sapphire, games Prince of Persia and SC. The video card is provided with the S-Video-to-RCA and DVI-to-d-Sub adapter.
The ATI Radeon X700 passed the examination in a test laboratory in the following environment: the processor Intel Pentium 4 3600 MHz (225MHz x 16) with the Hyper-Threading on; a motherboard on the chipset Intel 925 X; the RAM 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM 300 MHz; the SATA hard disk; the operation system Windows XP SP2 and DirectX 9.0c; the ATI drivers version 6.490 (Catalyst 4.10).
The testing was performed for 3D and 2D modes. Simultaneously, there is no good technology to determine a 2D quality of the video card. Almost each modern 3D accelerator may have a different level of 2D quality for a certain instance. The 2D quality also depends not only on the video card properties, but on a display and a connecting cable as well.
The discussed video card Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X700 Pro 256 MB demonstrated an excellent quality for the resolutions and clock rates 1600x1200x85Hz, 1280x1024x100Hz, 1024x768x120Hz . It works perfectly for the most popular 3D games, such as Counter Strike and Unreal, which are usually applied for the video cards testing. The Sapphire Radeon is one of the best solutions for gamers, who require the efficient hardware for playing new games.
This video card is also recommended for 3D design applications. It shows good results for the 3D Max application and many others. The time performance and quality of 2D graphics with this video card can be unexpected, since there are no certain definitions for the 2D processing - it depends on some components that are beyond the scope of the only video card.