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When you look at the PCB you can notice the reference design from the 2900 XT. There honestly is not one difference other then a sticker on the backside.

The cooler slightly differs (opposed to the XT) though, there's a new copper cooling-block mounted into this design with three heat-pipes, the Xt had two and granted. Cooling seems to be a tad better.

On the upper right side of the card in the photo you can see the two CrossFire connectors.

If you decide to go the guru path of righteousness  (read: Crossfire) then please understand you'll need to connect both the CF bridges. The Crossfire connectors will be supplied with the graphics cards, by the way.

Here we can see the two DVI connectors, which both have dual-link support. You might think "hmm, is that needed?" Yes it is. High-Def screens and high-resolution monitors are the key issues in mind here.

Dual link DVI pins effectively double the power of transmission and provide an increase of speed and signal quality; i.e. a DVI single link 60-Hz LCD can display a resolution of 1920 x 1080, while a DVI dual link can display a resolution up-to 2560x1200. All cards have two DVI connectors except the 1300 series which has a CRT/VGA connector.

With the help of the supplied DVI to HDMI adapter you can connect the card towards a HDMI HD Ready television or monitor for perfect picture quality and as explained; sound.

Here we have the external power connectors. You connect your power supply to these babies.

Now, you can connect 2x 6-pin power connectors here if you want to. The card will run absolutely fine. But if you decide you want to overclock, then the hard reality is that you'll need a 8-pin connector; otherwise the Catalyst Overdrive function will not unlock (you could divert that with Rivatuner obviously) but more importantly you'll need the power from an 8-pin connector for a stable overclock.

Alive and working in our primary graphics card test system. Granted, big but surely nice to look at with some UV lighting.