Got Apex? has posted a review on the Sapphire X700pro, Mainstream PCI-E Gaming Card

Technology jumps ahead in leaps and bounds. This time last year the Radeon 9800XT was king of the hill; PCI-E and DDR2 were nothing more than distant plans. This time last year was the last time I wrote a review since I was actually able to find a full time job. Sadly I had to drop reviews, and upgrading my computer. Finally I am able to leap ahead of the technology curve and enter the world of PCI-E. Things have changed quite a bit, video cards are strictly with the new standard and ATI has lost some of the lead it gained when Nvidia fumbled with the 5x00 series of video cards. While both have their strong points they are mostly neck and neck now. The race has been engaged once more.

The X700pro is based off of the RV410 GPU that has half as many pipelines as the 16 pipe X800XT+. Furthermore, the X700 has a 128-bit memory interface, which is again, half as wide as the memory bandwidth that the X800 series provides. The advantage for ATI is that the X700pro retains the 6 vertex pipelines of the X800, while Nvidia drops down to 4. With the clock speed sitting at 425/864 for memory, you are talking about a lower-end part that appeals directly to the mainstream market. With 256MB of GDDR3 memory the X700pro places itself in an affordable arena at the $200 price point.

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