We wanted it and now we've got it. The Radeon HD 2900 PRO has been one of the most talked about products since the release of the Radeon HD 2900 series from AMD. Sure the Radeon HD 2900 XT offers great value for money these days due to some excellent driver updates from AMD, but the bottom line is that the card still comes in at around $400 meaning that it's simply out of reach for a lot of people. When the Radeon X1950 PRO launched it wasn't greeted with the warmest welcome, much like the Radeon HD 2900 XT. While on paper it looked like it was going to be the next best thing, poor drivers at launch and a high price tag saw the card not really wowing a lot of people. - TweakTown

HIS Radeon HD 2900 PRO 512MB Video Card Preview

Hopefully AMD have learned from their mistakes and the Radeon HD 2900 PRO is simply going to blow us away as the next best thing. Its main competition is the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB from NVIDIA. Initial pricing from HIS shows the card's price at $250, for comparison the GTS 320MB starts at about $290. As we see more brands come on though and the initial price premium drop there isn't any reason why we won't see the Radeon HD 2900 PRO closer to the $200 mark. All it really has to do is perform better than the GTS 320MB and the card is an absolute shoe-in but that might be easier said than done.

Using the new slimmer and smaller boxes which we saw with the Radeon HD 2900 XT, HIS have a really nice sleek looking design going on with the Radeon HD 2900 PRO, this using the same layout. While we're not too sure what the image on the front of the box is, it looks cool and futuristic none the less and the blue/black combination looks great. The back of the box continues to give us more information on what the Radeon HD 2900 PRO offers along with some more main features of the card. A list of some of the awards that HIS have won are displayed as well which adds some bling to the package.

Yeps, the Radeon HD 2900 PRO is looking very similar to its bigger brother. Clearly, thanks to the same large cooler that is used on the Radeon HD 2900 XT line up it looks practically identical. HIS have managed to place their sticker in the center of the fan so we know where the particular card came from but apart from that we have the same flame design that we see on the reference Radeon HD 2900 XT. This isn't really a bad thing, the cooler is generally pretty good, while being a little on the loud side at full speed most of the time it's bearable. And that explains of course the similar view to the XT version.

As you would expect we have our two CrossFire connectors across the top and power for the card comes in the form of a 6-pin and 8-pin connector. Moving to the card's technical details, the core comes clocked in at 600MHz while the 512MB of GDDR3 comes in at 1600MHz effective. To put this in comparison the Radeon HD 2900 XT has a 750MHz core and a memory speed of 1650MHz effective. The PRO variant continues to carry 320 stream processors along with the 512-bit memory bus making the card nothing more than an underclocked Radeon HD 2900 XT which sounds positive.

The Radeon HD 2900 PRO is a power house and is simply going to be the card to own in this price bracket. Hopefully the NVIDIA driver team is hard at work to boost the performance of the GeForce 8800 GTS but how much more performance is still in it? This card is going to be extremely popular amongst users, the simple fact is that for the money there really is no better bang for buck and the current overclocking potential is beginning to look very positive. The card is actually that good that it forces the Radeon HD 2900 XT to lose some of its bang for buck due to just how close the PRO performs to the XT.

HIS have done a pretty standard job with the package and line up and while it isn't anything extremely exciting it's better than some other packages we see these days. The main thing is that the purchase of the PRO is going to depend on the package and price for most people. HIS aren't the cheapest brand yet their price looks extremely good when compared to the GeForce 8800 GTS. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when we see some of the cheaper brands hit the market and just how low the PRO can go.