Published in Reviews

Power Color / ATI R600, Radeon HD 2900XT

by on14 May 2007

Index



AMD's own user guide suggests a 750W PSU and you can read it here but we tested and figured out that a single Radeon HD 2900XT works with a quality 500W as well. However it won't work with every 500W PSU, especially not with the cheap ones.

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We won't go much into the architecture, as we wrote about it before but it is important to mention that ATI chip has 64 Shader units and they can deal with Vec5 scalar functions. ATI and a few developers claim that R600 has a much better geometry Shader than Nvidia but this is a DirectX 10 feature only and there are no any DirectX 10 games to put this claim to the test.

One other interesting thing is the DVI to HDMI dongle that should be able to take care of Audio but we didn’t had a chance to play with this much.

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ATI has a few drives but the launch one is called 8.364, however we also learned that 8.374a and b were available to a few of reviewers. There should be a 8.378 that can improve the performance for additional five percent but this is yet to be seen.

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The card has two PCIe power connectors one 4x2 pin for overdrive overclocking while the second one is the standard 3x2 pins. The card will work with two 3x2 pin connectors, but the driver wont recognize the overdrive overclocking option.

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Finally the card has an internal Crossfire connector and it looks identical to the ones we saw on RV570 based Radeon X1950 PRO cards.

The package includes two DVI dongles, DVI to HDMI dongle, HDTV cable and Avivo analogue cables.

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Let's not forget the Crossfire internal connector.  The package also includes the Voucher for Half Life 2 episode 2, team fortress 2 and portal games. You can also play Day of Defeat source game when you buy this card and unfortunately this is the only game that is actually out.


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Last modified on 15 May 2007
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