Topic: Video Card
Product: Gigabyte GV-RX70P256V-SP X700 PRO
Supplied By: Gigabyte
Date: 05/04/05
Reviewer: K. Elliott

INTRODUCTION

If you remember when the NVIDIA released the 6600 card to the public everyone was floored by it's performance, and when I say everyone that included the people at ATI.  The closest thing ATI had to the 6600 at that time was the X600 and that wasn't even close so the engineer went scurrying back to the design board and almost in record time ATI gave the press the specs on the new X700 coded on the RV410 core.

Which brings us to the GV-RX70P256V-SP we are looking at today is based on 0.11 micron processing and has the standard 16x PCI-Express interface and by all rights it should be slightly faster than a 6600 series card due to the fact that it has six vertex rendering pipelines along with the 8 pixel pipelines.

While the GPU is clocked at 420MHz, and its 256MB of Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20 memory runs at 864MHz stock the use of passive heatsink should keep the memory properly cooled under most operating conditions. We did find that the heatsink did get extremely warm to the touch after running extended length benchmarks so it might be advisable to make sure that you are using a case that is very well ventilated. Since the GV-RX70P256V-SP offers full support for Direct 9.0c there is no need to worry about the cards ability to provide the gamers with a video card  that offers great efficiency and the best picture quality with sharp and accurate colors for the money. The GV-RX70 series board level architecture is similar to the GV-RX80 Series, delivering a 3D Benchmark value up to 6000 and an amazing gaming performance. And for gamers who enjoy VGA running both quiet and fast, the GV-RX70P256V-SP won't disappoint.

Various versions of the X700

Core clock (MHz)	Pixel pipelines	Memory clock (MHz)	Memory bus width (bits)	On-board memory	Suggested Price
Radeon X700	400	8	600	128	128MB	$149
Radeon X700 Pro	420	8	864	128	256MB	$199
Radeon X700 XT	475	8	1050	128	128MB	$199
Radeon X700 XT	475	8	1050	128	256MB	$249

SPECIFICATIONS

RADEON X700 Technology Specifications
· 4 or 8 parallel pixel pipelines
· Six programmable vertex shader pipelines
· 120 million transistors on 0.11 micron fabrication process
· 64/128-bit memory interface supporting DDR SGRAM, DDR SDRAM, GDDR3 SDRAM
· AGP 8x or PCI Express®® x16 lane native support
· Video In/Video Out board versions available

SMARTSHADER™ HD
· Support for Microsoft®4® DirectX®® 9.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
· DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shaders
· Vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control
· Single cycle trigonometric operations (SIN & COS)
· Direct X 9.0 Extended Pixel Shaders
· Up to 1,536 instructions and 16 textures per rendering pass
· 2nd generation F-buffer technology accelerates multi-pass pixel shader programs with unlimited instructions
· 32 temporary and constant registers
· Facing register for two-sided lighting
· 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point color formats
· Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
· Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL®® via extensions

SMOOTHVISION™ HD
· 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
· Sparse multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sample patterns, and centroid sampling
· Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1)at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
· Temporal Anti-Aliasing
· 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
· Up to 128-tap texture filtering
· Adaptive algorithm with bilinear (performance) and trilinear (quality) options

3Dc™
· High quality 4:1 Normal Map Compression
· Works with any two-channel data format

HYPER Z™ HD
· 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with Early Z Test
· Lossless Z-Buffer Compression (up to 48:1)
· Fast Z-Buffer Clear
· Z Cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
· Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

VIDEOSHADER™ HD
· Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
· · FULLSTREAM™™ video de-blocking technology for Real, DivX, and WMV9 formats
· · VIDEOSOAP™u™ noise removal filtering for captured video
· MPEG1/2/4 decode and encode acceleration
· DXVA Support
· Hardware Motion Compensation, iDCT, DCT and color space conversion
· All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
· YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
· Adaptive Per-Pixel De-Interlacing and Frame Rate Conversion (temporal filtering)

Display Features
· Dual integrated display controllers
· Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs Integrated
· 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready)
· Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution

Additional Features
· Windows®4® Logo Program compliant
· · CATALYST™ Software Suite

2D DISPLAY MODES
Resolutions, colors and maximum refresh rates (Hz) in 256, 65K or 16.7M colors
Monitor Resolution Hz
640x480 200
800x600 200
1024x768 200
1152x864 200
1280x1024 160
1600x1200 120
1920x1080* 16:9 120
1920x1200 100
1920x1440 90
2048x1536 85

*16:9 aspect ratio monitors are supported on 1920x1080 and 848x480 on Windows®® XP, and Windows®® 2000. The complete list of resolutions depends on the driver version and operating system.

MAXIMUM 3D RESOLUTIONS
65K colors 2048x1536
16.7M colors 2048x1536
NOTE: resolutions are limited by the performance of the attached monitor.