The 110 million transistor ATI Radeon X700 core (aka R410) is built on TSMC's 0.11 micron manufacturing technology and is closely based on the high-end Radeon X800 core. To ensure that the X700 does not compete with the more profitable X800 GPU, ATi has cut down the core to just eight pixel rendering pipelines (as opposed to 12 for the X800 Pro, 16 on the X800 XT\PE). ATi also reduced the memory controller size from 256bit to 128bit. The otherwise hobbled Radeon X700 Pro still has the same six vertex pipelines, which means at the same clock speeds the X700 can, in theory, pump out as many triangles as its high-end brothers.

There are three members of the Radeon X700 family; the upmarket X700 XT runs with a core speed of 475 MHz and a memory speed of 1.05 GHz, but only comes equipped with 128MB of memory. Then there is the X700 Pro (as used on the PowerColor X700 PRO) which has a core speed of 420 MHz, memory speed of 864 MHz and comes with 128 or 256MB of memory. Finally, the budget X700 has a core speed of 420 MHz, 700 MHz memory speed and comes with 128MB of DDR.

Overclocking this bad boy!

We've had quite a bit of luck overclocking ATi cards recently and were hoping this tradition would continue with the PowerColor X700 PRO. Starting with the core at a stock 425 MHz, we passed the 450, 460 and 470 MHz marks quite easily. The core seemed to max out at around 483 MHz. Anything higher and the card would lock up while running benchmarks.

Since the X700 PRO uses Samsung K4J553430F-G20 BGA DRAM, we hoped to be able to push the memory quite far. Starting at the memory's default 864 MHz speed, we were ultimately able to stretch it past the 1 GHz mark, which was quite good. In the end the memory settled at a nice 1.04 GHz.

We had some problems running the core and memory at their maximum overclocked speeds together, and we had to lower both a bit to get the system stable. In the end we settled for 474 MHz core and 1.02 GHz memory speeds to keep everything playing nicely.

PCStats Test System Specs:

system 1 system 2 processor: intel pentium 4 540 intel pentium 4 3.0c clock speed: 16 x 200 mhz = 3.2 ghz 15 x 200 mhz = 3.0 ghz motherboards: gigabyte 8anxp-d, i925x gigabyte 8knxp, i875p videocard: gigabyte gv-rx60x128v gigabyte gv-nx57128d msi pcx5750-td128 albatron trinity pc5900 asus extreme eax600xt gigabyte gv-rx70p256v ati radeon 9800xt ati radeon 9800 pro ati radeon 9700 pro asus radeon 9600xt msi fx5950 ultra-td128 msi fx5900u-vtd256 msi fx5900xt-vtd128 aopen geforcefx 5900xt memory: 2x 256mb crucial ballistix ddr2 2x 256mb corsair twinx 3200ll hard drive: 40gb wd special ed 40gb wd special ed cdrom: gigabyte dvd burner msi x48 cd-rw/dvd-rom powersupply: vantec stealth 470w vantec stealth 470w software setup windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 6.0.1012 catalyst 4.11 detonator 66.93 windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 6.0.1012 catalyst 4.11 detonator 66.93 benchmarks 3dmark2001se 3dmark05 codecreatures aquamark gun metal 2 x2 the threat ut2003 doom3 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se x2 the threat ut2003

the agp and pci-e systems are different, but the results are included for reference. we usually run aquamark3 tests, but unfortunately this benchmark refused to run with the powercolor x700 pro.