One saucy big beast

The HD2900XT is big on ATi's red color scheme as you can see below.  A red acrylic with flame graphics fan shroud on top of a base of red PCB.  Even the variable speed turbine type fan is red.  But aside of the color grab the HD2900XT possesses, it also is a huge card.  Measuring a hair over 9 1/2 inches long, the HD2900XT is the largest card we've ever had in the shop.  As with most high end cards, this one is also a dual slot solution.

     

It's always lunch time from the looks of it.  Two power connectors are positioned just aft of the acrylic fan shroud; one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-E connector.  To satisfy your curiosity, you can install two 6-pin PCI-E connectors if your PSU doesn't have an 8-pin PCI-E plug.  Those two power connections also let you know that you can forget using an old meek PSU with the HD2900XT.  The outer HIS card packaging states that a 750 watt PSU is a minimum requirement.  I know the card is going to draw power but my money is on the 750 watt requirement is a minimum for a Crossfire rig and that a single card will run on a lower wattage system.  We tested the card on a 600 watt PSU and had no problems which seems to validate this theory.

Flipping the card over we find a large cooling plate over a good bit of the rear PCB.  This is to cool the 256MB of GDDR3 memory that's placed back here.  You can't stack all of the HD2900XT's half a gig of graphics memory on just one side you know.  Also shown below you can see the double Crossfire posts.  For my part I don't know why not just use one fat post instead of two but I'm no engineer.  All native Crossfire ready cards come with one VGA bridge cable.  So when you have two cards you have the two necessary cables to run them together.

  

Before we pry the cooler off, let's look at the connection end.  Two DVI connectors and a VIVO port are positioned just below the exhaust area's finger guard.  Remember that the HIS HD2900XT comes with two DVI to VGA adapters as well as a DVI to HDTV adapter.

Pulling the cooling assembly away we are able to expose the GPU and Hynix memory modules.

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - The Card / Test Bed
Pg 4 - NFS: Carbon / NFS: MW
Pg 5 - Quake 4 / STALKER
Pg 6 - Image Quality / Conclusion