Product Listing

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB (R600)

By Vincent Chang - 14 May 2007

The PowerColor Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB

The PowerColor Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB

Weighing almost a kilogram (950g), the PowerColor Radeon HD 2900 XT is a reference card with ATI's own heavy, heat pipe based cooler. For comparison's sake, the GeForce 8800 GTX weighs only 750 grams despite having a longer PCB. This is probably the first time that we have seen an ATI reference cooler using heatpipe technology but we suppose it is inevitable given the enormity of its task - to cool an extremely hot GPU without causing a din. From our experience with the PowerColor, it is relatively quiet though we won't recommend placing your fingers on the card for any length of time due to the heat.

PowerColor has surprisingly a very modest (and environmentally friendly box package) for its Radeon HD 2900 XT.

The card uses the popular heatpipe technology to reduce the warm temperatures within the core.

To recap the important details about this card, the R600 core is clocked at 742MHz, with 512MB of DDR3 memory running at 1650MHz DDR. The internal stream processors are clocked at 740MHz, which is almost identical to the core clock. Like the newer 80nm ATI cards (Radeon X1950 PRO), the PowerColor Radeon HD 2900 XT has Native CrossFire and requires no awkward dongles to work. It does require a bridge, which is not included in our package and ATI has hinted at plans of adding more than two cards in a CrossFire or even ATI Physics configuration.

Compared to its NVIDIA peers, the Radeon HD 2900 XT is slightly longer than the GTS but not as lengthy as the GTX.

Perhaps as a result of its higher power consumption, the Radeon HD 2900 XT requires two power connectors, a 6-pin and a 8-pin. Since most power supply cables are of the 6-pin variety, a Molex power converter is included for the 8-pin connector, though it must be said that the card itself is backwards compatible and will boot up using only dual 6-pin cables. However, we were recommended to attach the 8-pin cable if we intended to overclock and as the converter is provided, we don't see any reason not to play it safe. A power supply rated at 500W is also required at minimum for this card so that should be your first consideration before installing this card.

The new 8-pin connector is paired together with the usual 6-pin version.

The two CrossFire connectors for those who can afford two such heavyweight cards, in financial terms and in power usage.

Also, fans of Valve should rejoice for all Radeon HD 2900 XT cards come with an extremely attractive offer of three bundled, upcoming games from the Half Life developer. These three games - Half Life 2: Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 will be available for download when they are released for buyers of this card. We bet that vendors too will be grinning since they won't have to source for games to spice up their bundles. Hopefully, we can find more price competition among the vendors as a result rather than lavish bundles.

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