Retail X700 Pro Roundup

X700 Pro vs. 6600 GT

Why are we facing off the X700 Pro and the 6600GT? Pricing and availability are the two culprits there. There are no X700 XT parts to be had, and the only thing in the marketplace to compete with NVIDIA's Geforce 6600 GT from ATI is the Radeon X700 Pro. Finding a PCIe 6600 GT at $200 is a simple matter, and from what we see, there's all of a $20 spread between cheaper 256MB X700 Pros and the 128MB versions centered around the 6600 GT price point.

That being said, we do expect the $200 spent on a Geforce 6600GT to go further than on an X700 Pro. In order to test this theory, we ran some quick side-by-side performance tests of the two just to find out what the story is. We chose a resolution of 1280x1024, and tested with and without antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.

Half-Life 2 at_coast_12-rev7
	Radeon X700 Pro 256	Geforce 6600GT	Performance Advantage
noAA/AF	73.1	87.8	20.10%
4xAA/8xAF	48.1	53.3	10.80%
Winner	-	-	6600GT

Doom 3
	Radeon X700 Pro 256	Geforce 6600GT	Performance Advantage
High Quality noAA	35.2	60.1	70.70%
High Quality 4xAA	18.8	27.6	46.80%
Winner	-	-	6600GT

Far Cry Performance
	Radeon X700 Pro 256	Geforce 6600GT	Performance Advantage
noAA/AF	50	58.6	17.20%
4xAA/8xAF	26.5	29.3	10.60%
Winner	-	-	6600GT

Unreal Tournament 2004 Performance
	Radeon X700 Pro 256	Geforce 6600GT	Performance Advantage
noAA/AF	54.7	51.9	5.10%
4xAA/8xAF	37	33.4	9.70%
Winner	-	-	X700 Pro

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
	Radeon X700 Pro 256	Geforce 6600GT	Performance Advantage
noAA/AF	76.9	90.5	17.70%
4xAA/8xAF	44.1	58.7	33.10%
Winner	-	-	6600GT

We can easily see from these quick tests that the 6600GT holds a pretty consistent performance advantage over the X700, even in Half-Life 2. The only title in which the X700 leads is Unreal Tournament 2004.

Aside from architecture and performance, there are a few other differences. Most of the 6600GT vendors that we looked at in our recent review came with an HDTV dongle. This accessory allows us to connect to the component input of an HDTV rather than having to go through the DVI port (which some TVs don't have). ATI also offers HDTV support through a component dongle. We only received the ATI dongle in one of our vendor's packages, and we were less impressed with the ATI interface.