Sapphire Radeon X700 Pro Toxic Edition Review
Today we bring you a review of the latest addition to Sapphire’s Toxic family of graphics cards, the Sapphire Radeon X700 Pro Toxic Edition. Using the same Lethal Cooling we saw with the X800 Pro Toxic Edition, does the card have what it takes to outperform the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT? Come and take a closer look…
Introduction:
For the past few years, the mainstream graphic card market has become a proving ground for the engineers in the industry’s graphics card companies. Flagship models on both the ATI and NVIDIA front are usually all reference samples across the board, partly because they’re so expensive and also because they can’t be pushed or tweaked much past their shipping limits. A trend we started seeing first with the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 was companies, like Albatron, releasing overclocked and upgraded mid-ranged cards that would rival the performance of their flagship counterparts. The trend was largely on the NVIDIA front until Sapphire released their mid-ranged Radeon 9600 Pro Ultimate Edition card among rave reviews.
With the Ultimate Edition phased out, today we’re bringing you Sapphire’s Radeon X700 Pro Toxic Edition, the successor to the 9600 Pro Ultimate Edition and Sapphire’s first attempt to break into the mainstream enthusiast PCI Express graphics card market. Throughout our testing over the last few months we’ve seen the GeForce 6600GT outperform the X700 Pro on our Pentium 4 based systems, but today we’ll be testing with a brand new Athlon 64 4000+ based nForce 4 SLI system. So how does the Sapphire Radeon X700 Pro Toxic Edition stack up against the GeForce 6600GT? Let’s take a closer look.
Specifications:
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GPU
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ATI Radeon X700 Pro
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Processing Technology
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110 nanometers
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GPU Speed
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425MHz
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Memory
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128MB DDR3
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Memory Speed
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860MHz
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Memory/Core Interface
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128-bit
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Pixel Pipelines
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8
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Bus
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PCI Express x16
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Direct X 3D Hardware
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Full Direct X 9 support
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Output Options
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DVI / S-Video/ VGA
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Maximum Resolution
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2048×1536 @ 85Hz
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Package Contents:
•User Manual
•Drivers Disk with APE and Overclocking Utility
•Cyberlink PowerDVD
•Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
•Prince of Persia
•S-Video Cable
•RCA Cable
•Sharkoon Cold Cathode Kit
•DVI to VGA Adapter
•S-Video to RCA Adapter
Sapphire has long been known for having one of the best graphics card bundles in the entire computer industry, and with the Sapphire Radeon X700 Pro Toxic Edition, they’ve taken their bundle to an entirely new level. Packaged in are two aging, but blockbuster games, overclocking and DVD software, every necessary cable and adapter, and a mini cold cathode kit. Sapphire is the first graphics card companies I’ve seen take the initiative and include a cold cathode kit with their product, a great move to add more value to their product offerings. It’s great to see Sapphire innovate once again with their bundle, a move I’m sure many companies will imitate with their graphics card offerings in the months to come.
