Conclusion:

Well there you have it, no real surprises on the benchmarking front. The X700XT is a fine board capable of sustaining good framerates until you reach the highest resolutions in the newer game engines, much as you would expect for an eight pipeline card. What makes the X700XT attractive is the $199 asking price, around half the price of the 9800XT when it was originally released. Im hoping this will translate to a UK price around £130.

Ati will be releasing three models: the vanilla X700 clocked at 400mhz core, 350/700 ram which will retail for around $150, the X700pro clocked at 420 core, 865 ram with 256 meg of ram retailing for $199 and the 128mb $199 X700XT reviewed here today.

The card as it stands has some issues which I have noted, primarily the noise levels from the small fan especially when running in 3d mode, granted its not in the same league as the horrendous Nvidia 5800 boards of the past but its still more than a little unpleasant. Due to this underendowed cooling situation we had overheating and stabillity issues when we attempted any overclocking for more than a few minutes. ATI have been clear to state this is an engineering sample board and the final product will have a more substantial cooling unit fitted, but as it stands its impossible for me to give it a Driverheaven award.

Hopefully at a later date we will have the opportunity to review a "final" board and ill be able to give a more accurate conclusion, but until then this is certainly a very attractive teaser.