Test Rig Configuration

That's it about the card itself, from a hardware and design point of view. Leaving you with all with this impression on the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT we are going to move to the performance you can expect from this graphics accelerator. The system used to compile and analyze the gaming performance figures is build around the high-end Intel Core 2 Duo technology, which will provide extensive central processing power supporting the R600 visual and processing capabilities. We are using our new and high performing system based around the Intel 975X Express chipset powering our mainboard. So, let's go through the system specifications...

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz Dual Core Processor
• ASUS P5W Digital Home Deluxe (i975X) Mainboard
• G.Skill Extreme 2GB PC2-6400 Dual Channel Memory
• Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB Graphics Card
• Gainward BLISS 8800 GTS 640MB Graphics Card
• Western Digital 320GB Caviar SE 8MB Cache Hard Disk
• Speeze RockeTeer 600W (SLI Ready) Power Supply
• Cooler Master Stacker 832 (RC-832) Tower Case
• Arctic Cooling MX-2 Performance Thermal Compound
• Dell UltraSharp 30" 3007WFP (Black) LCD Flat Display
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 Edition

As you can see we have used the some high performance components, and we would like to express our thanks to Gainward, G.Skill and Jetway for their generosity on supplying us with some excellent hardware. The ASUS mainboard is based around the Intel 975X chipset supporting the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR2 memory. We will be using our modest Core 2 Duo E6300 but running at 2.8GHz to support the high-end graphics cards. So both the mainboard and CPU are fine tuned to support this overclocking, to provide the maximum compatible and stable clock speeds. Currently the Core 2 Duo processors are the top of the market, with AMD trailing behind.

And a very special thank you to Dollarshops for supplying us a retail sample of the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT edition. This very flexible way of using the Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics accelerator allowed us to do some extra tweaking, and analysis on the actual impact of the shader clock on the gaming performance. We truly enjoyed playing with the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 series, and gave us great pleasure.

Additional Specifications

First we will grab some information from Everest Ultimate Edition and get some feedback on the video card sub system. Lavalys was nice enough to allow us to evaluate their software for our reviews. I really like the wealth of information this utility gives us and we thank Lavalys for their support. Everest Ultimate Edition 2007 is the cutting-edge benchmarking and diagnostics tool to maximize security, performance, and troubleshooting capabilities for home and office PC environments, PC professionals and consulting firms as well as OEM partners and configuration centers worldwide. We ran some analyzing tests using Everest and this is what we got.

Yeah, the Radeon HD 2900 XT is totally different as to what we have seen previously from ATI and that has to do with the unified shader technology. We don't speak anymore about fixed vertex and pixel shaders but about stream processors that can be used according to what is required. So these stream processors are capable of being dynamically allocated to the vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operations. The Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT comes clocked at 742/1656MHz with a shader clock at 742MHz, which are actually the reference clock speeds. The Radeon HD 2900 XT edition is powered by the R600 core and features 320 stream processors and 16 raster operations units.

One thing we didn't mention yet is what is included in the bundle as extra, meaning what is included as software and games? Well, just looking at it doesn't reveal that much. Once we look further we see that some fancy free copy of the Black Box is included. This new collaboration between ATI and Valve will enable anyone buying a Radeon HD 2900 XT to download the forthcoming game bundle that will include Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. Before going further, we would like to show of the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT card being placed in our system. Let's do that and see how the Radeon HD 2900 XT edition fills up a free PCI Express expansion slot.

Yeah installed and ready to power our system. But before we go on, this card looks good in our system, what am I saying it looks awesome! We can already notice that the cooling does not interfere with any surrounding motherboard components. Although the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT is a dual slot design it fits perfectly in our case. So you are right, the Jetway card takes up one addition expansion slot, but then again it comes with a very decent cooling solution even at full load. That's it folks, time to hit up some synthetic benchmarks. We used the Catalyst 7.7 drivers from ATI and will be using Futuremark and RyderMark benchmark utilities and stack up some popular game titles. Let's hit the road...