Nope. The 9700(R300) is a very good chip for what it cost and wasn't designed to do much beyond push pixels very quickly. The heat and power pull was the highest ATi shipped at the time, but was still a one slot solution. The x300 (RV370) is on the other hand a chip built more for low power/heat mobile use (most RV products turn into mobile solutions as well).

The low end of a new product line is rarley better then what the near high end was in the last generation. For example, it took on average a Radeon 9500 or above to beat the Radeon 8500. In most cases, the 9000/9100/9200 cards were noticibly slower then the 8500.