ATI have been busily churning out desktop graphics chips in 2005 to meet the changing market conditions and take advantage of process changes - the RV410, chip that powers the new line of Radeon X700 boards, is the fifth desktop chip out of a potential 8 in 2004. Unlike some of the chips that have been produced RV40 is a new configuration of performance and feature elements, with the features being drawn from the slightly more advanced R420 architecture, and performance elements from all over the place! Ostensibly Radeon X700 is designed as a mainstream part, with the remit of bringing last years high end performance to mainstream prices, however rather than just taking onboard a Radeon 9800 configuration, X700 has only a 128-bit memory bus, 8 fragment / pixel pipelines, and 6 vertex shaders. In this review we take a closer look at the architecture, and put both a reference ATI X700 XT platform and a retail Sapphire Hybrid X700 PRO board to the test.

We put both these X700 boards under numerous tests to look at its architectural make-up and gaming, PCI Express and video decoding performance to see where their performance lies in relation to the rest of the "X" line and whether it exceeds the performance of the 9800 PRO. Read the full review here.