Retail X700 Pro Roundup

Final Words

From our initial inspection of the Radeon X700 Pro vs. the Geforce 6600 GT, it is very clear that the only available members of the X700 family don't pack the punch that they need to surpass the value offered by NVIDIA. Looking at this fact, it seems clear why ATI would need to push out a lower cost version of its higher end parts in the new 110nm X800 lineup.

For those out there who are die-hard ATI fans and absolutely need to have an X700 Pro solution, we can recommend that you simply head out and find the cheapest X700 Pro available. That suggestion makes it hard for us to recommend the HIS solution, as it will almost certainly cost more than the other three cards that we reviewed today (especially if looking at the TURBO/VIVO options).

At this point, it won't be enough for ATI to simply replace the non-existent X700 XT with their new X800 solution. To remain competitive with NVIDIA in the $200 mid-range space, they will need to bring out the X700 XT and push its price down. It's hard to believe that vendors would sell the XT at the same price point as the Pro considering the performance advantages the former would have. As a competitor to the 6600GT, the X700 XT is a better part in many ways (cost and availability are not among them). But its little brother is just not up to the challenge.

We want to see temperature data available from the full line of ATI parts. We understand that keeping the automatic overclocking value-add as part of their high end product lines is a priority, but all we want to do is check the temperature of our GPUs. Diagnostics have been available on motherboards for years now; NVIDIA has a temperature gauge in their driver for all 6 series parts, so it's time that ATI caught up with the industry.

A built-in manual overclocking tool would be nice as well. Getting a legal department to sign off on such a thing is a tough sell, and we understand that. But making it hard to get to, voiding warranty or restrictive otherwise seems to work for other companies.

In the end, we really liked the solution from HIS, but not attached to the X700 Pro. They make excellent enthusiast cards, and we'll take this opportunity to recommend one of their X800 based solutions to anyone who like the features that they saw in this round up.