Overclocking Comparison
Unfortunately, ATI doesn't have a utility on the level of NVIDIA's coolbit's registry tweak. We decided to use the ATI Tray Tool for our overclocking needs, as it has a built-in artifact tester. Now, I wouldn't trust it to find a final overclock speed, but it does a good job of finding a maximum from which to work down. The little 3D application just doesn't push the GPU enough to really make it fail if it's going to fail at a certain clock.It's a little trickier to overclock ATI GPU's than NVIDIA's. Artifacts are harder to notice, and stability is more a question of whether you can get through a run without CPU recover kicking you out of your application. Regardless, we generally followed the same methodology that we used to overclock our 6600GTs.
The maximum overclock that we see is the PowerColor's 15.3% increase to 490MHz core clock speed. The 8.5% overclock of the ABIT 128MB card is less than what we expected to hit. We don't think that this was a temperature related issue, as the ABIT heatsink is heavy, mounted well, has a lot of surface area, and sounds like it moves plenty of air. Of course, if cooling was the only thing that mattered, the HIS card would have done better than PowerColor.
As far as memory clock goes, it looks like something between 980 and 990 is what we can expect to see from overclocked X700 cards. All of these cards would run at about 990, but we had to drop the frequency of the ABIT, HIS, and Sapphire cards in order to maintain stability over extended periods of operation.
It is interesting that the 2ns RAM can't quite reach 500MHz on ATI cards, but soars to 600MHz on NVIDIA cards in some cases. This indicates that ATI is pushing latencies first while NVIDIA is focusing on bandwidth.
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cosmotic - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
Your text ad thing turns "Unreal Tournoment" into a link thats the same color as the table header background so it looks like "2004 Performance". Why do some Anand articles use pretty graphs and some use these relitively harder to read tables?MAValpha - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
I dunno. I have one of these cards (Retail Built-By-ATI 256MB Radeon X700 Pro), and I didn't even try to push it too far. I set it up to run at XT speeds, and it does it with no problems. Performance at these settings isn't anything to sneeze at either, since it more or less matches my 6800 vanilla (within 5%, off the top of my head). Remember that preliminary benchmarks position the 6800 vanilla almost on par with the 6600GT, also.Granted, the two PCs are different, but they are both fairly close to top-of-the-line. One is a Prescott-775 running at 3.8 on i915P, the other is an AXP running 2.4 on NF2 Ultra. While they are understandably different processors, games turn in comparable framerates on both. Everything else is the same in both rigs, right down to the RAM and hard drives.
nserra - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
"For those out there who are die-hard ATI fans and absolutely need to have an X700 Pro solution, we can recommend that you simply head out and find the cheapest X700 Pro available."I do a better one, buy the basic X700, only 25Mhz lower clock and 150Mhz memory, and over clock it. And save 50$.
One thing must be pointed out, if X700 Pro is worst over 6600GT, "regular" X700 is better over "regular" 6600.
#9 My point answer your question or doubt?
ChineseDemocracyGNR - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
What I'd like to see is the $149 non-PRO non-XT X700, which is also non-existant.skunkbuster - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
can anyone tell me why ati's open GL drivers continue to suck? when are they ever going to catch up to nvidia in this regard?stelleg151 - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
I assume that the ATI cards should be considered identical to the Powercolor cards because of same look?bloc - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
Bang for the buck especially in the mid range.If ati priced the x700 accordingly and had some cards to sell, I'd consider it. Cripes I'm waiting for the 9800 pro to come down to $150 US to the 6600 GT's $200. I'd then go for the 9800 pro.
overclockingoodness - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
All I have to say is that NVIDIA's 6600 solutions are to get for mid-range setups.DerekWilson - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
The icon should be fixed -- I'm not sure what happened there :-)slurmsmackenzie - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
did anyone else stop reading after the head to head with the 6600GT?.... i just assumed everything else was just superfluous details.