Issues and Conclusion
Issues
Really the only issues we saw during our testing of the X700 Pro were the same we saw in our recent Chaintech Apogee AA6800 review: small driver bugs that kept us from getting all the tests at all the resolutions we wanted. This time there was one instance from each manufacturer.
I would have liked to test the 6600GT against the top mainstream card from ATI, the X700 XT, as I think the results would have been more closely matched. I didn’t have time to play around with overclocking the Pro card to XT speeds, but even if I did, the added memory would have given the X700 card an advantage over any retail cards you might find. NVIDIA’s 6600GT is the top-mainstream product and its competition is going to be the X700 XT card — I’m sure we’ll have benchmark results from it very soon.
Conclusions
It is absolutely amazing what a few months can do for the graphics card market. We saw the introduction of $500 flagship cards and now we see the push of the $199 mainstream cards that are doing more than the last generation’s flagship cards. If we didn’t have the urge to have the very best and have it now, it would seem you could save a lot of money by just waiting a bit and reaping the benefits of the latest technology on the following mainstream launch — but this pattern is found everywhere; processors, motherboards, memory; finding that sweet spot of buying time is always difficult.
Our benchmarks showed the X700 Pro to be slower than the NVIDIA 6600GT card, but not by a lot in most cases. The Doom 3 results were as expected, with the NVIDA card out in front, but the X700 Pro did so much better than the X600 XT card, that it was just exciting to see a $200 ATI card perform as well as it did. In Far Cry, the results were much closer with ATI winning on some of the later 4xAA / 8xAF tests.
On the other benchmarks, including City of Heroes, UT2004 and Battlefield: Vietnam, we saw the NVIDIA 6600GT card come out on top the majority of the time, but within a reasonable reach behind it is always where the X700 Pro card found itself. Indeed if you are true frame rate kind of user, then the 6600GT is going to be your better buy, but how the 6600GT is against the X700 XT, I can not tell you yet. The added memory of the Pro does have some advantages over the 128 MB of both the X700 XT and the 6600GT card, but those areas are pretty slim and games don’t seem to be one of them as our benchmarks show.
I was impressed with the image quality results we saw from the X700 Pro as well. It was equal to or better than the 6600GT in our four different analysis shots including the Doom 3 results. Though both vendors are using some tricky optimizations in their drivers to get faster results, neither one’s optimizations seemed to hinder the image quality of our gaming experience at all.
I didn’t get enough time before writing this to overclock the GPU at all but due to the fact that we found a X700 XT core under the hood of our Pro, I don’t think the ramp ups are going great and thus the overclock-ability of the core speed is probably not very good — yet. When retail products hit the shelves and when 3rd parties put out their own cards, we’ll know for sure.
The battle for the mainstream market has never been so fierce as it has been now with both NVIDIA and ATI throwing all their weight behind new sets of products. The 6600 and X700 series are both set to clot the bleeding of your wallet during your PCI Express upgrade (see upcoming PCIe AMD chipset articles) and gamers have their hands full trying to decide which is going to be the top contender. While NVIDIA has a pure performance edge, the ATI X700 Pro is a strong competitor and I feel the X700 XT will be even more so.
Don’t you just love a good competitive marketplace?
