The X700 Pro sits a step below the X800 XL in ATi’s mid-2000s lineup — a mainstream PCI Express card rather than a flagship. On paper it’s a solid late-DX9 option. In practice, mine has given me nothing but trouble, first in testing and now in old age.
What it is
The X700 Pro is a PCI Express card built on ATi’s RV410 GPU, launched in 2004 as a mainstream option below the X800 series. It has 8 pixel pipelines on a 128-bit memory interface, paired with 128MB or 256MB of GDDR3, and was positioned as a card fast enough for real DirectX 9 gaming without the power and heat of the flagship cards above it.
Specifications
- Released: 2004
- GPU: RV410
- Pixel pipelines: 8
- Memory: 128MB or 256MB GDDR3, 128-bit bus
- Core clock: around 425MHz
My card
Mine is the 128MB Connect3D Radeon X700 Pro.
Windows 98
Not a success story. Testing it in a Dell Dimension E520, the X700 Pro froze Windows 98 outright as soon as the Catalyst driver loaded — the exact same failure as the Radeon X600 on the same machine, with no difference between Catalyst 6.2 and 9.0c. See the full write-up for the rest of that machine’s driver troubleshooting.
Showing its age
The years haven’t been kind to this card since. The fan bearings have worn out, leaving an audible grinding noise, and both text and graphics-mode video are now corrupted — pointing at a VRAM fault.
It needs proper attention before it’s useful for anything again.
Pros
- solid mainstream DX9 performance for its era
- modest power and heat compared with the flagship X800 cards
Cons
- froze Windows 98 outright in my testing — a Windows XP card, not a Win98 one
- mine now has a failing fan and VRAM corruption
