The interesting thing about Gigabyte is that it offers graphics adapters from NVIDIA and ATI in two separate product lines. Some manufacturers feel that doing this would create competition within its own products, thereby yielding average financial results in the end. Apparently, Gigabyte thinks otherwise. In addition to working with NVIDIA and ATI, Gigabyte also has an impressive engineering team that attempts to bring new technologies in the market. With a company of this magnitude, it’s pleasant to see them working diligently on the number of products they offer. Previously, we have evaluated Gigabyte’s 6600GT and were thoroughly impressed by the price and the applications bundle, which wasn’t great, but decent enough to stay one step ahead of its competition. Today, however, we have Gigabyte’s ATI offering, the X700 Pro. Can Gigabyte deliver another solid solution? Read on and find out…

All Image Courtey: Newegg

The board layout of the card is fairly average and complies with ATI’s general specifications. Unlike some of the other graphics adapters we have evaluated from various manufacturers, Gigabyte’s offering only has a heatsink and fan combo with no RAMsinks to cool memory modules. Usually, what we have found is that RAMsinks don’t exactly help in all scenarios. For instance, GDDR3 memory generally tends to overclock exceptionally well and having RAMsinks on such modules make little to no difference in final overclocking results. Even though the fan was quiet enough, we wonder if it’ll be sufficient to cool the GPU well enough under stress testing. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the actual heatsink aspect of the card is nearly missing and the fan is pretty much supported by the minimum amount of copper.

Since there is no custom cooling solution, the back of the card doesn’t have a clip to support a thermal solution.

As always with Gigabyte, the package includes a driver CD in addition to two full version games: Thief and Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising. Although neither one of these titles are current, they are certainly better than what majority of the manufacturers include in their bundle, which is next to nothing. Besides, Thief is still a fairly impressive game graphics wise, so you are not losing out on everything.

Gigabyte’s X700 Pro follows ATI’s set specifications with stock speeds of 425MHz (core)/430MHz (memory), PCIe x16 interface, eight pixel pipelines, 128MB of onboard memory, 128-bit memory interface, D-SUB, DVI and S-Video/Composite Out ports.

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

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