X-bit labs

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

ATI RADEON X700 PRO Graphics Cards Reviewed. Choosing the Best RADEON X700 PRO Graphics Card

The battle for customers is raging in the performance-mainstream segment of the graphics cards market. Some manufacturers offer outstanding bundle, others - silent fanless cooling and fancy design. In case you clearly decided to that what you need is something based on ATI RADEON X700 PRO graphics chip, but cannot settle on particular product, you should probably check out the reviews of those graphics cards, we picked up some for you.

France-based web-site PC INpact has reviewed six ATI RADEON X700 PRO-based graphics cards from ASUS, GeCube, MediaMax, MSI, PowerColor and Sapphire. All of those cards have a bit different bundles, connectivity and some have only 128MB of memory.

“I can only advise you to invest in X700 PRO with 256MB of memory. Like it could be seen from various benchmark results, additional 128 MB have their importance in demanding games like Half-Life 2 and Far Cry, in case FSAA and anisotropic filtering are activated, or in high resolutions,” PC INpact concludes.

Canada-based web-site Rage3D has also managed to review a couple of ATI RADEON X700 PRO products: from HIS and Sapphire Technology.

“By my count, the [HIS X700 PRO] IceQ Turbo comes out ahead in 4 of the 10 tests I ran, with the [NVIDIA GeForce] 6600 GT performing faster on the other 6 tests. The IceQ Turbo holds commanding leads in the Half-Life 2, Richard Burn's Rally and, to a lesser extent, the Pacific Fighters tests. The Pacific Fighters results are somewhat surprising considering NVIDIA’s traditional dominance in everything OpenGL (as you can see by the other OpenGL tests). 3DMark05 rounds out the performance advantages for the IceQ Turbo. The widest margins for the 6600GT came with Doom III, where it unsurprisingly holds a huge lead in all the results. Call of Duty, Chronicles of Riddick, and Far Cry also seem to perform best on the 6600 GT in these tests,” reports Rage3D.

“The Sapphire RADEON X700 PRO Toxic card performs very respectably in a lot of ways. Even with only half the amount of memory it manages to keep up to the other X700 PROs in most tests. It's really too bad though that there’s only 128MB memory because we’re at a point in time when the need for 256MB with some games is becoming very real, particularly when Anti-Aliasing is used and in cases such as with Half-Life 2 and Far Cry, even without Anti-Aliasing. There’s just not enough room in there to hold all that data and performance suffers greatly because of it,” says Rage3D.

• PC INpact: RADEON X700 PRO Roundup (in English).
• PC INpact: Six Cartes Graphiques RADEON X700 PRO (in French).
• Rage3D: HIS X700 PRO IceQ Turbo Review.
• Rage3D: Sapphire Toxic X700 PRO Review.

More and More Customers to Use 3G – Nokia. Nokia Forecasts Big Jump in 3G Subscribers

While 3G networks truly bring nearly ultimate communication capabilities to cell phones, customers are reluctant to migrate to the new standard because quite some of the benefits the innovative phones and network provide should be actually supported by operators at relatively low cost, at the same time, some more services are needed to be offered for casual users, something they don’t have on conventional phones.

“A big 3G driver will be music and multimedia downloads,” said Simon Beresford-Wylie, executive vice president of Nokia’s networks division.

“Nokia is forecasting a sharp rise in 3G network subscribers, and is suggesting that at least 70 million subscribers will be using the technology by the end of 2005, up from 16 million at the end of 2004. The upbeat prediction came as the Finnish handset maker launched three 3G mobile phones and digital music collaboration with Microsoft Corp.. Microsoft will port the latest version of Windows Media Player to Nokia handsets. The combination will allow music to be transferred between mobile phones and PCs,” claims CommsDesign web-site.

• CommsDesign: Nokia Forecasts Big Jump in 3G Subscribers.