Die internationale Presse scheint auch nicht so ganz überzeugt zu sein:
Clubic
http://www.clubic.com/ar/16500-1.html (they called the ATI Control Center ...the Catastroph Center)
"Disappointing : this is the word that sums up the best the X700 that ATI propose today.... With this test, it seems obvious that ATI was caught by the GeForce GT of NVIDIA. ATI gives birth with pain to a X700, poorly convincing....For sure, the drivers seems to be particularly a catastrophy, which doesn't help ATI business...As it was not enough, ATI must face two problems that are worse : the noise generated by the board which is far to high and its strange behavior in PCI Express.. In summary, the X700 lacks of maturity and is a poor competitor to the GeForce 6600 GT."
Hardware
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/517/page1.html
"The Radeon X700 XT has nothing to envy a Radeon 9800 Pro despite a 128 bits bus !...We'll regret the relative immaturity of the latest Catalyst drivers : we feel that ATI rushed a bit to launch this product under the pressure of NVIDIA...Despite some adjustments of last minute from ATI re. the frequencies of the Radeon X700 XT, this product is not globally faster than the GeForce 6600 GT ."
Presence-pc
http://www.presence-pc.com/news/Gamme-X700-le-test-n5096.html
This test is more neutral, telling that the difference of perf is mainly due to sw optimizations sometimes in favor to ATI and sometimes to NVIDIA and suggest that the importance of TWINTBP and Get In the Game.
"Again, we had a bug on the drivers or on the testing software, and got too low fill rates...Thanks to a T&L engine very powerful, we could state that NVIDIA has a clear benefit in that domain"...
Toms Hardware
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040921/index.html
Our test of the X700 was accompanied by a number of problems. As has been the case several times in the past, we received our review sample at a very late date. Our testing was further complicated by the fact that ATi had overlooked a bug in the new Catalyst Control Center (CCC), which caused all tests that were supposed to run with anisotropic filtering forced on to be run with only bilinear filtering. The upshot was that all of our scores turned out to be much too high.
Luckily, we chose not to install the new CCC driver menu with .NET on our testing system, opting instead for the classic control panel application which is still available.
HardwareUpgrade
http://www.hwupgrade.it/articoli/1084/15.html
To sum it up, we believe that NVIDIA designed a more convincing product that the ATI counterpart (X700XT) from every perspective, therefore the match between the Radeon XT700XT and the GeForce 6600GT ends with the latter one being the clear winner.
Bittech
http://www.bit-tech.net/review/357/8
...... the board was unable to complete our full test suite due to problems with both the boards' thermal management and the drivers. We are told that the thermal issues that we encountered with the sample board were a problem that was specific to the board that we tested - this will be confirmed at a later date when we get the chance to test another X700 XT once the driver bugs have been addressed and fixed. Nonetheless, this does appear to have an air of a rush-release about it - clearly ATI are worried about the 6600 cards.
There is an air of disappointment surrounding the fact that we could not get the board to run CS: Source without issues, as this was one benchmark that is likely to determine many graphics card purchases over the next six to twelve months. The board that we tested would not allow us to configure Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering from inside the game; subsequently, the performance when using control panel driver details was severely hampered due to the fact that Catalyst AI appeared to slow the game down. There were also serious issues with Need For Speed: Underground, where it would appear that Catalyst AI was working overtime due to the fact that the driver was under the impression that it was not rendering the image correctly, according to the reference rasterizer. The CS issues are interesting, considering that Half-Life 2 is an ATI sponsored game - one would think that this would be the one thing it would work on. It's all very well harking at the performance of your next generation card, but releasing it for review with drivers that won't run common benchmarks is pretty dodgy. One might be something of a conspiracy theorist and say that ATI's lead in the Source engine isn't quite as much as it would like yet, but that is (mostly) pure speculation.
It is also worth pointing out the fact that the heatsink/fan design is a very noisy one - when the GPU is loaded, the fan spins up to a rather off-putting noise level. This can be heard clearly above other noise pollution coming from our test system, which is enclosed in a steel case. We were under the impression that computers were to be getting quieter - the board, when loaded, is close to the noise levels that were the norm back when the GeForce 3 was the performance leader. The X700 series is supposed to support a passive cooling solution if the BTX form factor ever takes off. If it doesn't, we can only hope that ATI's add-in partners come up with a more convincing heatsink/fan design that isn't quite so loud. Haven't ATI learnt from NVIDIA's Dustbuster Disaster?