Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I gave this card 3 stars even though I never actually got it to work. Reviews of this card convinced me that the Radeon X700 was a wonderful value for people who want to play games but who don't want to spend $500 on a video card.
The first thing to be careful of is the wattage. Radeon says on the box that a 300 watt power supply is required, but I was unable to find the exact amount of power the card uses anywhere in the documentation or specifications. ATI seems to have taken care to hide that data, which means that even if you have a 300W power supply in your computer you may still be unable to make this card work.
Power supply wattage is a tricky thing. Power supplies tend to be sold based on how many watts they can supply at max, yet that number is misleading. Power supplies have to take 110V power (or 220V in other parts of the world) and "step down" that power to supply 3.3V, 5V, and 12V current. Each of those different voltage "rails" have their own maximum wattage, so it is possible to have two different 300 watt power supplies, one of which might give you the power you need and one of which might not. (...)
The second thing about this card is that the most recent Catalyst drivers give the user a Radeon control panel that is truly terrible. Your Radeon used to be configurable by going to Start->Control Panel->Display->Settings->Advanced. The Radeon configuration would be a series of tabs attached to this dialog.
Not any more! Now the Radeon configuration dialog is a standalone application, and it is a very bad one. I run Windows in a very high resolution, so the "Normal" font size is far too small and I have chosen the "Large" font size. The Radeon configuration applet is a fixed size and you cannot make it larger, so the "Large" font size causes half the text and controls in the applet to be missing! You actually have to turn your font size back to "Normal" just to configure your video card! Appalling. They spent time giving the user custom "skins" to choose from, yet they didn't spend two minutes to test what would happen with a larger font size.
The third thing to be careful of: My motherboard aparently doesn't like modern Radeons. I was unable to get my computer to boot with the X700 installed, so I flashed my motherboard BIOS to the most recent version, installed the absolute newest chipset drivers/GART, and it would try to load Windows and just halt every time. There's so many things that can be a factor in whether a modern video card works, so be patient and try everything. Call or e-mail their tech support, like I did. Once I had done everything ATI said to do, there was nothing to do but take the card back.
I took the card back and got a GeForce 6600. The GeForce booted on the first try and performs flawlessly on my machine. Go figure.
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ATI's Radeon X700 Series brings a richer visual experience to all PC activities such as 3D gaming, watching movies and streaming video, Internet browsing, viewing and processing digital photos, or home office applications such as preparing multimedia presentations and spreadsheets. Whether upgrading or buying a new PC, the Radeon X700 will easily handle today's visual entertainment and workload with plenty of power in reserve for tomorrow's possibilities.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 HyperZ 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 VideoShader HD -Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time, FullStream video de-blocking technology for Real, DivX, and WMV9 formats, VideoSoap noise removal filtering for captured video, and MPEG1, 2, & 4 decode and encode acceleration System Requirements -AGP Requirements -AGP 8x or 4x graphics slot available on motherboard
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