HIS Radeon X700 AGP Review

Introduction

With VGA manufacturers releasing only PCI Express-based video cards, owners of AGP-based PCs were simply forgotten. Even though you can find quite easily AGP VGAs on the market, AGP users cannot find the latest releases for the AGP platform. And there are a huge crowd out there willing to upgrade their VGA to newer models without having to replace the whole computer. Thinking about this crowd, HIS released an AGP-based Radeon X700, which should satisfy owners of AGP-based PCs that are anxious to see new VGA models being released for this platform. Let’s see how the performance of this Radeon X700 AGP from HIS is.

Figure 1: HIS Radeon X700 AGP.

As you can see in Figure 1, this model is part of IceQ series from HIS, where the video card uses a special cooler that pulls hot air from inside the computer case to the outside.

Radeon X700 is a mid-range graphics chip and its official specs include a 400 MHz clock rate, a 600 MHz memory clock rate, a 128-bit memory interface and eight pixel shader units – by the way, this chip still uses Shader 2.0 programming model, while chips from Radeon X1000 family and GeForce 6 and 7 families are Shader 3.0.

We ran PowerStrip software to check what clock rates this video card was using, and we discovered that its memory was running at 700 MHz and not at 600 MHz. So, its specs are the same as Radeon X700 LE and not of the regular Radeon X700. Funny enough there was no clue on the box about this. It should.

You can see in our tutorial “ATI Chips Comparison Table” the difference between this chip and the other chips from ATI, while on our tutorial “NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table” you can compare it to its competitors from NVIDIA.

Radeon X700 is a PCI Express chip. So to connect it to AGP bus it is necessary a bridge chip, shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Bridge chip used on HIS Radeon X700 AGP.

Let’s now take a closer look at the Radeon X700 IceQ AGP from HIS.