It taken some time, but AMD/ATI introduced the Radeon HD 2900 XT in May. With full DirectX 10 support and some pretty awesome multimedia features the card looked to be pretty nice. Finally ATI had a competitor for the GeForce 8800 series. To that extend we gotten our hands on the version from Sapphire, which is actually a standard Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card. This is the first time that we see ATI entering the DirectX 10 segment, with as well unified shader technology. The technical specifications look promising, with some features never before seen on a GPU, making these cards innovative and one of a kind. We will see if these can go up against the GeForce 8800 series. - Overclock3D

Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 XT Graphics Card Review

Sapphire have adorned their Radeon HD 2900 XT's box with the usual space age CGI character. However we were pleasantly surprised to see that their is a small viewing window to allow you to see the actual card itself, something we appreciate in the packaging. This is sure to tempt people towards the card as it shows it off in all it's glory. The inside of the box is equally well packaged with a nice foam insert for the card to sit in. The package that comes with the card is nestled in it's own box below the card itself. All is well on the packaging front then, although the box information could be a little less crowded.

The Radeon HD 2900 XT is another beast of a card from ATI, sizing it up though shows us that it isn't actually as big as you would think it would be. The GeForce 8800 GTX is actually longer and the Radeon HD 2900 XT is more the length of a Radeon X1950 XTX graphics card. The one major difference you will notice in the Radeon HD 2900 XT is that there is a heatsink wrapped around the rear of the card. Undoubtedly this is to cool the memory, power management chips and take heat away from the PCB. This is actually very effective and the Radeon 2900 XT is certainly less hot than it's GeForce 8800 GTX rival.

The cooler on the Radeon HD 2900 XT is very effective in keeping this power hungry GPU cool, but not so good at keeping it quiet. The fan on the Radeon HD 2900 XT is very similar to that of the GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX. However, unlike the pretty nice and quiet cooler on those cards, the fan on the Radeon HD 2900 XT seems to ramp up to a pretty loud whine which can be very irritating and off-putting. Certainly if you are thinking of putting the Radeon HD 2900 XT into a media centre then you would have to think of a different cooling solution or risk not hearing your movies. Though, the cooler is well designed.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 XT is a nice card and is in our eyes a good solid release from ATI/AMD. In our games the results were mixed with the ATI offering often beating the GeForce 8800's out of the door as regards to delivered frame rates. The Radeon HD 2900 XT also showed it's colors in the Futuremark suite, scoring some nice numbers. However, one does wonder if it was enough to release a card that merely competed with NVIDIA's mid-high range cards. It's certainly left the market wide open, giving customers more choice, but has it given them motivation to buy an ATI branded product?