Retail X700 Pro Roundup

ABIT

Of the four Radeon X700 Pro cards that we tested, the ABIT card was the only 128MB part that we saw. This gives it a slight price advantage, but it also falls behind a bit in stock performance because of it.

On the up side, this part was the only one to include a heatsink that covered the RAM as well as the core. Other solutions had ramsinks, but since the cooling hardware on the ABIT card has a shroud that directs air across the RAM and GPU, there should be better cooling across the entire range of things that heat up.

The core on this card didn't overclock as well as the other X700 parts. Since there isn't any difference in which cores go on 128MB and 256MB parts, this is either luck of the draw or cooling issue. Because ATI's non-XT lines don't have built-in temperature sensors, we were unable to determine which of these is the culprit here.