There is no doubt that AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XT got off to a bit of a rocky start. The initial drivers were nothing to get excited about and made the performance overall look pretty ordinary. The biggest problem though is that it seems most people have already made up their minds. I will not lie to you, I had. I honestly saw the initial results and thought the card was a joke considering how long we had been waiting for it. The good news is that ATI are really on the ball when it comes to drivers. It has been like this for a few years now and it only took a new set of drivers to really make the Radeon HD 2900 XT something worth having as far as we are concerned. - TweakTown

MSI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB PCI Express Review

People all over the world now are recommending the Radeon HD 2900 XT over the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB and we are about to investigate why. The box is big, MSI have gone for an ASUS style box which is large, in your face and generally looks pretty good. The biggest gripe with these boxes is that they are more costly to freight; they do not fit in standard air bags and are just generally a bit of a pain in the butt. The front of the box has all our general information like the model, amount of RAM, the fact that HDCP is included and a few other key features. We can also see that a copy of the Black Box is included.

With the package out the way it is time to have a closer look at the card to see what exactly MSI have done with it. Like most high-end cards these days though, there really is not much more than a sticker on the front and some stickers on the back. Turning the card over we have a huge back plate that manages to take over most the card. We can see our normal array of stickers all over the place that show us the model along with serial number and C-Tick. Moving around the card we have the new power connectors. While we have the standard 6-pin PCI Express connector, we also have an 8-pin connector.

The clocks on the card are standard coming in at 743MHz on the core and 1656MHz on the memory. MSI have got a water cooled model coming out in the near future which should see some increased clock speeds but for the moment we will just have to play with the stock clocked model. Hoping the HD 2900 XT could continue to shine when we move in to the overclocking side of things we fired up the AMD overclocking program that has been floating around the internet. Starting at 743MHz on the core we moved to a massive 860MHz, the memory managed to also go pretty hard to 1880MHz.

The new drivers have helped the card a lot, it really does go from a joke of a product to something that you could recommend. The biggest problem we see is that AMD may have already done the damage by not waiting another week or two for the new drivers to come out. The biggest problem with the card would have to be the amount of power it draws alongside the fact that this in turn makes it operate at higher temperatures. It is literally a mini heater in winter and we do not want to know what it is like in summer. Onto the positive points, the package from MSI is great, with course Orange Box, it has a lot going for it.

You of course cannot forget the fact that AMD is really on the ball in the driver department. We should continue to see more and more performance out of the card as time goes on meaning that it could become quite the killer card. Yes, it is late to the market but as long as people realize it is a good card AMD should be alright and give them a chance for the next generation of cards due out later this year.