By the time you come to the last page of this article there will be little doubt that ATI is back in the video card business, big time. After the inevitable stumbling following its takeover by AMD, its engineers and staff fleeing to NVIDIA, its head offices being consolidated, the five billion dollar arm of ATI is flexing its mighty muscles once more. ATI, now confusingly called AMD, has blitzed the market with a big red slice of silicon known as the Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics processor. NVIDIA, which has gotten used to having free reign in the video card market, must be sweating at the sight of CrossFire finally working with killer effectiveness and stepping up to take on multi-GPU segment. - PCStats

Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB Video Board Review

Given the upheaval of a post-merger situation, the slow adoption of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system has actually worked in ATI's favour. Nothing gets the juices flowing more than a couple of top of the line video cards fresh out of the box. Diamond Multimedia is getting back into high end video cards, and what better way to reintroduce itself than by releasing a video card based on AMD's blistering 720 million transistor Radeon HD 2900 XT GPU, with a staggering 1GB of GDDR4 memory no less! It's ATI's absolute best technology available, and we have two of these bad boys on the test bench today.

The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT VPU core runs at 743MHz while the 1GB of GDDR4 memory hums along at a very sweet 2GHz. In pairs, the Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT is CrossFire compatible on supporting motherboards. You to can share in the joy of a flagship gaming experience, but with a retail price of $499 per Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB video card, it's not for the faint of heart. It takes two Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT video cards to enable CrossFire; we are sure you can do the math on that. The Diamond Viper video card we received did not come with any games included.

Diamond's Viper HD 2900 XT video card comes out of the box with a GPU running at 743MHz, memory clocked at a cool 2000MHz effective. By all accounts that's already faster than most graphics cards, but not fast enough to dissuade us from overclocking the Radeon HD 2900 XT GPU and its cadre of GDDR4 memory even further. The Radeon HD 2900 XT core ran out of steam once it hit 825MHz, anything higher and the system would lock up while running benchmarks. The memory frequency was increased in 10 MHz jumps, easily breaking past 2200MHz and finally topped out at 2270MHz.

ATI is back, big time. Diamond Multimedia has made a splash with one of the hottest video card cores in the market. Its new Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB graphics card is one incredibly fast solution, but when you're dealing with the Radeon HD 2900 XT, speed is a given. With a retail price of $499 per video card, the Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB is actually priced pretty aggressively for a flagship graphics solution. To run the Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT alone, or in a CrossFire pair you'd better have a top of the line PC system with an absolute most important component the power supply.

In terms of performance, a lone Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB video card is very quick. In most games the Radeon HD 2900 XT is as fast as a single GeForce 8800 GTX. If you have a platform that supports CrossFire, like the Intel P35 or 975x Express, running one or two of the Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB video cards in your system offers a real alternative to NVIDIA's Geforce 8800 GTX graphics cards. No matter how you look at it, the future of DirectX 10 gaming has gotten much brighter with the introduction of Diamond's Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB video cards.