As much as you like ATI and its GPUs, the fact is that ATI isn’t a charmer in the midrange market due to its under-performing X700 Pro. Although the performance may not be as groundbreaking as NVIDIA’s 6600GT, the fact is that majority of the X700 Pro graphics adapters retail for much less than NVIDIA’s 6600GT. That’s one side of the story. If you want to give ATI a bit more credit and applaud it for its performance, you can technically compare it against NVIDIA’s regular 6600, which costs the same as X700 Pro with significantly less impressive performance numbers than what ATI offers. On a more neutral note, however, ATI’s X700 Pro does manage to be competitive under Half-Life 2 and Doom III, two of the four games we tested, under high resolution with AA and AF turned on. So, although it may not be the performance screamer, it’s still a decent candidate if you are keen on playing the aforementioned titles.

When you talk about ATI GPUs, Connect3D is hardly the company that gets mentioned by enthusiasts, but that doesn’t mean their cards are third class, or are they? The standard specifications for ATI’s X700 Pro include eight pixel pipelines, six vertex shader pipelines, 128MB/256MB onboard DDR3 memory, GPU speed at 420MHz and memory speed at 432MHz. As you can tell, majority of the adapter’s features are comparable to that of NVIDIA’s 6600GT except clock speeds, which could potentially be the undermining factor of sub-par performance.

Similar to NVIDIA’s case, we aren’t expecting an isolating performance difference from one X700 Pro manufacturer to another, and ultimately the recommendation would depend on application bundle, price and overall value in general. How well does Connect3D stacks up against tier one manufacturers? Read on and find out…

For all your graphics card buying needs, check out Newegg.com

Next