Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT Crossfire review

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Page 2 - A Jetway Piece of Tech

Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT

The AMD ATI Radeon HD 2900-series features 320 stream processors, over twice as many as NVIDIAs GeForce 8800 GTX, yet clocked way slower. AMD couples the 320 stream processors with a 512-bit memory interface with eight channels (8x64-bit obviously). CrossFire support is now natively supported by the AMD ATI Radeon HD 2900-series; the external CrossFire dongle is a thing of the past, and we'll show you that on the next pages.

Much like NVIDIA's G80 silicon, AMDs ATI Radeon HD 2900-series also possesses the ability of physics processing with the help of the unified shader architecture, DirectX 10. Yes, physics can be done through shaders.
New to the ATI Radeon HD 2900-series, are integrated HDMI output capabilities with 5.1 surround sound. Let's take a look at the product, bundle and then go a little more in-depth feature by feature, shall we?

And although we did that with mixed feelings (performance wise), we cannot deny that it can become a very popular product. Really, it's showing nice high-end performance, yet it's priced cheap for a high-end segment product. The MSRP is 399 USD folks ... That's amazing for a 700 million transistor counting product. Yes, a 700 million transistors product from which the architecture really is based off the Xbox 360; which is good. As we now have 64-bit (128-bit FP texture filter) HDR capability, improved HQ anisotropic filtering and even 8192x8192 HR textures.

Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT review

What's inside the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT box:

  • One red little monster
  • SVIDEO/Composite cable
  • Crossfire bridge (x1)
  • 6-pin to molex power connectors (x2)
  • RCA HDTV Analog cable
  • DVI to VGA dongle (x2)
  • DVI to HDMI Adapter (1)
  • Driver CD
  • Manual
  • The Black Box Coupon

The Jetway card itself is clocked at reference speeds. I do expect some manufacturers to bump that core speed up a little quite soon, as our tests consistently show ... There's lots of headroom to overclock.

model number X29XT-EN-512Q
chipset Radeon HD 2900 XT
core clock 740MHz
memory clock 1650MHz
memory type

512MB DDR3 / 512bit

Unified Stream Processors 320
Physics processing support yes
RAMDAC 400MHz
bus type PCI-Express 16X
driver support windows /2000/XP/Vista/ - directX 10
HDCP yes
Connections DVI / HDMI / HDTV

So with the Series 2000 you'll receive a DVI to HDMI adapter which, and make no mistake here, will carry sound over HDMI. That's unlike current DVI-HDMI adapters and cables which do not carry sound. Fantastic if you are watching a Blu-ray movie, simply connect HDMI to your HDTV for PCM sound, or connect it through a TrueHD/Dolby HD receiver and get that sound lovin' going on through that receiver of yours. All with one simple cable.

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT review- Copyright Guru3D 2007

Here we can see that DVI to HDMI dongle that is supported with the HD 2000 series Radeon graphics cards. It'll be included with all Series 2000 graphics cards.

A really clever solution to be honest, it saved manufacturers from building a separate SKU specifically with HDMI connector. Plug it in and let the fun begin.

 

Three-in-One - Black Box Bundle

Jetway is sweetening up the deal for you. Like most other manufacturers every HD 2900 XT you purchase, a game-bundle is included. You receive a Valve "Black Box" coupon.

This new collaboration between ATI (now owned by AMD) and Valve will enable anyone buying a HD 2900 XT to download the forthcoming game bundle that will include Half-Life: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. The Black box will be brought to the retail chains later this year by Electronic Arts while the games will also be available via Valve's digital distribution system; better known as Steam.

This is a very sweet deal you get here!

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This is really bang for your bucks guys, again all Radeon HD 2900 XT cards have this coupon bundled with them. For those interested we have a movie trailer of the blackbox available for download, click here (68MB).

With that being said, and before we dive into the actual technology and features, let me place all five products in an easy to read chart:

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ATI Radeon
HD 2400

ATI Radeon
HD 2600

ATI Radeon
HD 2900

# of transitors

180 million

390 million

700 million

Stream Processing Units

40

120

320

Clock speed

525-700 MHz

600-800 MHz

742 MHz

Memory Clock

400-800 MHz

400-1100 MHz

828 MHz

Memory bandwidth

6.4-12.8 GB/sec

12.8-35.2 GB/sec

106 GB/sec

Math processing rate (Multiply Add)

42-56 GigaFLOPS

144-192 GigaFLOPS

475 GigaFLOPS

Pixel processing rate

4.2-5.6 Gigapixels/sec

14.4-19.2 Gigapixels/sec

47.5 Gigapixels/sec

Triangle Processing rate

262-350 Mtri/sec

600-800 Mtri/sec

742  Mtri/sec

Texture Units

4

8

16

Render back-ends

4

4

16

Memory

256MB GDDR3
128/256 DDR2

256Mb DDR2, GDDR3 GDDR4

512MB GDDR3

Memory interface

64-bit

128-bit

512-bit

Fabrication process

65nm

65nm

80nm

Power Consumption (peak)

~25W

~45W

~215W

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