Here's a quick look at the R600 graphics chip clocked at 743MHz.  Nice lap job BTW.  The R600 brings a number of changes to the AMD/ATi table as far as architecture.  We are not going to get into a MIT litany here but I do want to point out one R600 feature for you HDTV peeps.  The R600 actually is able to integrate an audio processor and send these signals out via the DVI connection.  Shape of things to come perhaps?

  

Shifting over to the reference design cooler, we find a thin finned copper assembly within the outer acrylic housing.  A few screws later and we can view the dual heatpipe stamped fins of the HD2900XT.  This looks like an improvement over HIS's famous IceQ3 cooler with the HIS's contrasting single heatpipe stamped copper design.  We'll have to see because the bar is set pretty high with the HIS cooler but a similar design with dual heatpipes suggests quite a bit.

     

The last physical piece of the card we are going to look at today is its memory.  Under the heatsink we find eight Hynix memory modules on each side of the HD2900XT's PCB.  These GDDR3 units are clocked at 828MHz.

Performance

Testing today will focus on the practical performance increases that the HD2900XT has over its predecessor the X1950XT.  We do have a few extra surprises thrown in for good measure.  One of these is testing done from a $400 perspective.  The MSRP of the HD2900XT is $400 which is the same price as two GeForce 7900GS cards in SLI, so to give you something to add to the other reviews out today, many of which are focusing on the 8800GTS comparison. 

Another change for us here is that we are adding a few new games into our benchmarking suite to keep things updated and relevant.  Testing will be done using Need For Speed: Most Wanted, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Quake 4 and Need For Speed: Carbon.  All games will be run at 1600 x 1200 resolution with settings set to maximum with the exception of FSAA or where otherwise mentioned.  Setting FSAA to 0x during testing especially against a NVidia product is only fair since each camp goes about FSAA differently.  Each of these games will be benchmarked with the FRAPS program for a three minute period in each game where we can recreate gameplay and action sequences for as close a real world benchmark as you can get.

Test Bed

• ASUS P5N32-E SLI mainboard

• Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4GHz) @ 3.0GHz - 1.51 volts

• Tt MaxOrb Cooler

• (2) 1GB OCZ PC2-6400 Ti Memory (4-4-4-15) @ DDR2-867

• 250MB Western Digital Caviar SE SATA II HDD

• Generic 16x DVD-RW drive

• OCZ ProXStream 1000w PSU

• Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed

• Open rack mounting

• ThermalRight Chill Factor Thermal Paste
   

BACK                    NEXT

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