Introduction

Let us introduce you to the world of Jetway, technology on the move. Jetway was established in Tapei, so in Taiwan around 1986. This dedicated and professional motherboard manufacturer is founded on values such as genuine and honesty. Jetway presents IT products of quality and performance with experiences of being devoted motherboard design, producing and manufacturing for over 20 years. In that aspect Jetway contributes and delivers the reliable system foundations of efficiency for the platform of global modern IT industry today and beyond. Jetway has been around in the graphics and mainboard industry for a long time, but mainly manufacturing products for other partners. Quite some Jetway products actually don't hit the market as such but under a different brand.

Their mission is to provide innovative IT solutions that empower their customers reaching their full potential with scalable high performance computing solutions such as motherboards, graphics cards, barebone systems, workstations and servers, where high density, reliability, affordability, security and unsurpassed quality are required. This is their focus and their differentiation versus other manufacturers or providers on the global market today. Since Jetway has been producing products for quite a lot of other brands on the market their name is not so visible as it should be, but that is about to change due to switching some ore their focus to products of their own. And so this is the right time to get to know Jetway a bit more in detail.

At last, that is the least you can say about the Radeon HD 2000 series. It took AMD, the former ATI quite some time to get the two companies together and back on track for releasing new products, but they have done it. Surely we expected it much sooner, and with high expectations and those are a bit disappointing. Although the new high-end Radeon HD 2900 XT accelerator from ATI has been released and widely available. And yes we all expected the even faster XTX version, but that one is just for system integrators as it just takes up too much space. The Radeon HD 2900 XT is based on the high anticipated R600 chipset which supports both high speed GDDR3 and GDDR4 memory chips. But okay, now we finally got something to go up against the already ancient GeForce 8800 series.

The most interesting part of the Radeon HD 2000 series, is that ATI can now compete with NVIDIA and that they are still in time for the first DirectX 10 games. In fact AMD remained largely silent about their upcoming new technology and quite some rumors did spread around the globe about what the new R600 would and wouldn't be. In the end the R600 didn't make such a big entrance as we all expected, mainly due to the real absence of the XTX version and that NVIDIA anticipated quite effectively with their GeForce 8800 Ultra version to steer up the critics. The Radeon HD 2900 XT is the first card from ATI to feature the Unified Shader technology, which seems to be essential for full DirectX 10 support. Next to that ATI has completely switched to the internal CrossFire bridging for multi-GPU technology.

The Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT unleashes the power of DirectX 10 with awesome performance, stunning visual effects, and more dynamic interactivity than ever before. Something to notice is that ATI got rid of the typical "X" in front of their model number, and did replace is with the "HD" prefix which stands for High Definition. Indeed also ATI is going for the high definition for both gaming and video playback, which is natural as NVIDIA is doing the same for their GeForce 8 series. One of the first to bring out a Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card was in fact Jetway, and well you can't really blame them as they manufacture these cards as well for other ATI partners. So being the first is certainly an aspect where Jetway can excel and a great advantage.

Main Features

• Radeon X2900 XT (R600 at 742Hz)
• 512MB 512-bit GDDR3 Memory (1656MHz)
• High-Speed 512-bit Memory Interface
• Memory Bandwidth of 105.6GB/s
• High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection
• H.264 Playback with Avivo HD Engine
• Multi-CPU CrosssFire Interconnect Support
• DVI-I Connector for Analog/Digital Display

It has been a very long period of waiting for the next generation graphics solution from AMD, and during that time the Radeon X1950 series had to sustain the power of the GeForce 8800 series in an odd battle which it just couldn't win. The change is upon us, and the older R580 core can finally retire and step aside for the R600 chipset to take on the GeForce 8800 series. The R600 core is a completely new design dedicated to the unified shader environment that the new DirectX 10 technology has somehow enforced. This means that you can't speak about fixed vertex, pixel or texture units but these are now combined in what it called stream processing units. These stream processors can either be used as pixel or vertex shaders, which means variable depending on the needs.

Being different is what makes the difference and will attract any potential buyers interest than just being plain and simple. And surely, when looking at the Jetway package you can deny that it isn't as any usual package. The box itself details very clearly the product that you are buying as well as the main features, that it is a PCI Express card with high performance GDDR3 memory. The black box does make quite an impression and does catch our eye quite easily. Well, somehow that isn't that strange as it comes with some shiny silver text that reflect the light and doing so draws your attention towards it. But of course the most important aspects are the features, and one being the first DirectX 10 capable graphics accelerator.

Turning the box around reveals not that much more, although we get the details about the Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card in seven different languages. On the sides there isn't much either, except at the top side. There you will find the main features of the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card, such as CrossFire support, Windows Vista ready, HDMI capable and DirectX 10 ready. Well, from our end we like this all black box with the small window at the top that shows you a good view on the card enclosed. With Jetway going for more market share and by retail products for the actual users, and not only as main manufacturer for other brands they have made a very decent design for their package.

The Jetway version of the Radeon HD 2900 XT follows the reference design just like any other. The first versions of the Radeon HD 2900 series all come from the same production and each of the brands puts their own colors and logo on it. Although not all of them put full sticker on the cooler, so it depends a bit what each manufacturer does as extra to show their colors. These cards are bigger than the previous Radeon X1950 series with the actual PCB almost completely hidden away behind the dual slot cooling solution. As we have seen with the previous series, the cooler has once again been redesigned to come up with an efficient thought silent cooling solution. A great looking red card that will have to turn odds in favor of the ATI team.