Up Close, a Jetway Spotlight...

You should by now have some main impressions of the Radeon HD 2900 XT card, and for us that means it is time we dig a bit deeper into the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB and check out the card a bit more closer in detail. We will start with the front and move slowly to the back. We might not have mentioned this, but the Jetway edition is built upon the reference design set by ATI, which is actually case for most manufacturers. And when looking back at the Radeon X1950 XTX, you might not notice much difference neither on the board itself besides another new designed cooling solution. We will actually take a closer look and highlight some of the vital features, and some of the benefits...

The Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT edition features the standard cooling solution designed by ATI. The only minor difference that Jetway has applied with the retail package is the Jetway sticker on top of the cooling fan with their own logo. The fan used on the Radeon HD 2900 series isn't the same as we saw on the Radeon X1950 XTX cards, instead ATI opted to come up with a new design following the Arctic Cooling way, and thus able to provide a more quiet cooling solution. This certainly is some good news as that has been the biggest burden of the Radeon X1900 series, and since than ATI took another road and to keep on focus with having a decent cooling but still keeping noise levels as low as possible.

What should be said is that normally all the Radeon HD 2900 XT accelerators come with the same reference cooling solution, at last the first cards. That means that normally all these Radeon HD 2900 XT's should be quite equal in terms of performance and game play experience. What other brands are however doing is to stick another sticker on top of the red plastic cooler, on top of the gray imprinted flames. However Jetway didn't go that far and is sticking with the reference cooler and only adding their branding label on top of the fan itself. In the end that isn't a bad idea at all as this way you keep the transparent view on the inside of the cooling solution. And well, we personally like that approach as we are always curious on what lies beneath.

We couldn't just leave without some images with the focus on the fan itself. It has a decent amount of fins which add up in the air flow it can generate and on top of that it is UV sensitive. The red fan will definitely please some case modders out there who are using all kinds of LED's for getting their system that unique look and feel. On top of that the complete cooler is semi transparent and following the red color scheme that ATI has laid out with all their products and the gray flames on the shroud provides a great contrast to all that red. This cooling solution does remind us a lot of the cooling on the GeForce 8800 series, though seems to be heavier and with a bigger fan. The new heatsink design looks awesome as a whole and does look more impressive than the cooling solution used on the Radeon X1950 series.

Like all other high-end graphics cards, the Radeon HD 2900 XT uses a large cooler that takes up two slots. The large cooler is necessary to keep the GPU cool. Remember, there are 720 million transistors in there, running at 742MHz. The cooling system of the Radeon HD 2900 XT is actually a blower pumping air from inside the PC case and into the thin-ribbed copper heatsink with a massive sole and is then exhausting it to the outside. This is quite efficient and has been used adequately by most of the Arctic Cooling heatsinks. This technique also makes use of a lager blower which will run slower though can move more air and reduce the noise tremendously. The Radeon HD 2900 XT uses a tremendous amount of power and that produces a large amount of heat, which warrants this dual slot cooling design.

The cooling solution is designed quite simply. The copper sole that has direct contact with the GPU transfers its heat to a heatpipe which is passing the heat over to the set of thin copper ribs on the left of the fan; the ribs are covered with a profiled case. The hot air is exhausted outside, which helps the overall cooling efficiency. The cooling system is manufactured well. The copper ribs are pressed tightly to the heatpipe to ensure proper thermal contact. Both sections of the heatsink become very hot at work, indicating good heat transfer. This solution reduces the amount of hot air circulating within the case and improves the cooler's performance, as well as reduces the thermal load on the other components inside the case.