Thoughts
The main focus of this article, as far as the second XT is concerned, was to see if ATI had solved the thermal issues that I and some other reviewers thought were inherent in that first X700 we'd evaluated. They've succeeded, but not at the expense of some extra noise from the fan which moves much more air over a larger heatsink than before. I'm also slightly concerned about the mounting method for the heatsink, which allows some movement if you exert force on the edges of it. I'd hazard a guess that ATI's partners will seek to change the heatsink to something of their own, hopefully quieter and more secure, design.
The new driver also offered no real performance-related surprises, although that was maybe to be expected, given that the newer driver's most major difference over the older driver was a fix for 256MB Radeon AGP boards. I look forward to retesting a new PRO at 420MHz on the new driver too, for completeness. A hunch says the heatsink on any new PRO board will be a bit different too.
And it's the PRO, the second focus of this article, that's the better of the two X700s for me, providing shipping boards deliver the same DRAMs as were present on the sample I saw. Rated to 1000MHz, and with the PRO sample overclocking nicely into the 460MHz range for me, it's essentially a 256MB XT for the same money as the 128MB version, give or take a wee bit of clock speed on the core. You should be able to get 1050MHz out of the GC20 DRAMs on a PRO, without issue. After all, NVIDIA managed 1100MHz on those same devices on a reference product, at one point!
It'll be hard to resist the PRO at retail if the memory configuration comes out unchanged, given its $199 and identical to X700 XT 128MB price point.
Relative performance to 6600 GT doesn't matter so much as the feature differences do. X700 PRO is generally competetive with the NVIDIA card, if not any faster, so the NVIDIA board's better feature set counts. From this reviewer's perspective, the gamer looking to spend ~£150 on a mid-range enthusiasts board to play games on his or her nice monitor, and so being able to play games at high resolution, would do well to very much consider the 256MB PRO over the XT. The memory density shows little effect in the mainly synthetic benchmarks I threw at it for this reference board review, rather its biggest effect is in the performance improvement it offers you in games like Far Cry and Doom 3, at the afore mentioned high resolutions. A little overclocking on your new board and you're laughing.
The XT doesn't make much of a case for itself up against either the PRO or the 6600 GT. The noise of the new cooler compounds things. My personal preference in this sector at the time of writing is the 6600 GT. SLI and Shader Model 3.0 are on the verge of making decent cases for themselves, so I'd be looking to take advantage of that. With 6600 GT's strong performance against XT and PRO all the better.
The PRO (as reviewed) is recommended if ATI is your bag, choose the 6600 GT otherwise.
