Although Abit is well-known for wild motherboards brimming with overclocking and tweaking options, the company's Radeon X700 Pro graphics card is considerably more conservative. Abit actually has an impressive vGuru suite of graphics-specific goodies, including advanced hardware monitoring, temperature-drive fan speed control, adjustable GPU core and memory voltages, and dual BIOS chips for overclocking, but to date vGuru is only available on older Radeon X600 and X300-based cards. vGuru will eventually make its way to current-generation X700 products, but it's not there yet.

The lack of vGuru makes the Abit X700 Pro a little bland, but with a $165 street price, it's one of the least expensive cards in this comparison. At least simple is affordable.

Simple doesn't look bad, either. The Abit card is dressed in a unique shade of orange and features a silver cooler that covers both the GPU and memory chips. Abit isn't messing around with the cooler, either. Rather than using flimsy plastic push pins, the cooler is securely anchored to the board with metal screws. Unfortunately, I worry that the cooler's decorative fan guard may end up impeding air flow. It looks nice, but is probably unnecessary. With larger, faster processor cooling fans rarely shielded by fan guards, getting your finger caught in a GPU fan is probably the least of your worries.

With a standard assortment of DVI, VGA, and S-Video outputs, the card's port cluster isn't much to look at. However, the cable bundle is pretty complete.

The Abit Radeon X700 Pro comes with a DVI-to-VGA adapter, S-Video-to-composite video adapter, and both composite and S-Video cables. The thin, flexible cables are pretty sexy, too. Unfortunately, Abit's generosity in the cabling department doesn't extend to software. The card comes with a copy of PowerDVD, but that's it. At least Abit doesn't bundle in a filler disc loaded with years old game demos that can otherwise be downloaded for free.

Of all the cards in this comparison, the Abit Radeon X700 Pro's warranty is the most complicated. The card comes with a three-year warranty, but parts and labor are only free for the first 15 months. After the first 15 months, Abit charges a flat $25 fee for labor. 15 months of full parts and labor coverage isn't bad, but it's not as good as some of the other cards we'll be looking at.