HIS Radeon X700 IceQ 128MB AGP Graphics Card

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Specifications of the HIS Radeon X700 AGP 128MB

Based on the ATI Radeon X700 chipset, the HIS X700 IceQ graphics card sports 8 dedicated pixel pipelines and 6 vertex shader pipelines. In the world of 3D cards, this is what really makes the difference in the pixel game. You can have a card with a super-high clock speed but without the supporting infrastructure to intelligently render textures, shadows and visual effects, it’s never going to be more than a number cruncher.

The internal clock speed weighs in at 400MHz. This is compared to 300MHz for a standard GeForce 6600, and 500MHz for a GeForce 6600GT. It sports 128MB of GDDR3 RAM, with a 128-bit memory interface and a 700MHz DDR memory clock speed (compared with 900MHz DDR for a GeForce 6600GT AGP).

Memory bandwidth clocks up with a maximum bandwidth of 11.2GB/sec. This is essentially limited by the AGP bus – cards based on the X700 chipset but with a PCI-Express bus manage up to 16.8GB/sec. This has made the AGP video card market an interesting one to watch. The new graphics technologies which have been dominant for the last eighteen months are very much geared towards the higher throughput capacity of PCI-Express. And yet, the upgrade from AGP to PCI-E isn’t an easy one as most of the underlying architecture – motherboard, CPU and memory – needs to be upgraded with it. Not a cheap exercise. So, manufacturers have still had to cater for all those systems, some of them quite high-end, which are still based on AGP technology. Most AGP cards, like the one we’re testing here, are backwardly-compatible to AGP 4x, but run natively at 8x.

The HIS X700 also adds support for HDTV output.