Things are definitely looking up for TUL, the Taiwanese graphics card maker formerly known as CP Technologies. The company is also one of ATi's most important board partners, working very closely with the Canadian graphics chip maker. However, you might not recognize the name "TUL", because they use the brand name "PowerColor" for their graphics cards, which many mistake to be the company name.

We took a closer look at their PowerColor X700 PRO PCI Express card. The card follows ATI's X700 reference design completely, both visually and as far as technical specifications are concerned. The red PCB uses ATi's new mainstream graphics processor, the RV410, which features eight pixel pipelines and six vertex shader units. The chip runs at a core frequency of 425 MHz and is produced on a 110 nm process. TUL's card comes with 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM, running on a 128 bit memory bus at 860 MHz (DDR). An angular heatsink/fan combination provides adequate cooling for the graphics processor. However, it's not exactly the "strong silent type" - it becomes unpleasantly audible when operating in 3D mode. The memory modules receive no cooling.

The card features the usual array of connections, namely one each of VGA, DVI-I and TV-Out. The card draws all of its power from the PCI Express slot and doesn't need an auxiliary power connection.

The card's layout corresponds to ATi's reference design.

Although the fan isn't overly noisy, it is still quite clearly audible when in operation.