To get all the juicy details on what makes the ATI Radeon HD 2000 family tick please read our ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT evaluation.


This is our first evaluation of a retail Radeon HD 2900 XT based video card, today we are evaluating Sapphire’s latest entry to the market. Sapphire is well known for being ATI loyal, and seeing as how they are ATI’s primary manufacturing and distribution partner, it makes sense. The Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 XT is your standard, to the bone, reference design. The same features you will find in our initial evaluation of the Radeon HD 2900 XT from ATI are the same here.


There are 700 million transistors inside based on a unique 80nm HS manufacturing process. There are 320 stream processing units and an external 512-bit memory interface with 512MB of GDDR3. You will find support for DX10, 8X multisample antialiasing and 16X angle independent anisotropic filtering. The clock speeds are exactly the same at 743 MHz for the core and 825 MHz (1.65 GHz DDR) for the memory. There is also the standard built in HDMI audio controller on board for outputting a full HDMI signal.


In our initial evaluation we looked at single video card performance compared to the competition, first with a 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS then we followed up and showed you comparisons with a 320 MB GeForce 8800 GTS. In this evaluation we are going to cover single video performance again, but with even newer drivers and we will compare it to a multi-GPU configuration in CrossFire as well as NVIDIA’s SLI.




CrossFire


The Radeon HD 2900 XT supports what ATI calls native CrossFire. In native CrossFire ATI has built the compositing engine required for CrossFire into the ASIC itself. This means that every Radeon HD 2900 XT is capable of combing with another to make a CrossFire connection. There is no need for a master/slave scheme. ATI has also done away with the external dongle and has incorporated two internal bridge connectors atop each video card.


You do need two CrossFire connectors to make CrossFire work; it will not function with one. Each CrossFire connector will actually be shipped in each retail package itself instead of the motherboards. So if you get one retail video card you will have one CrossFire connector. When you purchase the second retail package you will get the other connector so you can CrossFire them.


One downside to the CrossFire connector we have encountered is the length of the connector itself. It seems that ATI will not provide a longer connector for those that wish to separate their video cards on their motherboards with three PCIe slots. With the short CrossFire connector you have to place both video cards in adjacent slots which means they rest right next to each other, smothering the video card in the primary PCI-Express slot of oxygen. It can really lead to a bad situation if you have an enclosed case and poor cooling. We run in an open-air environment, and even we put an extra 90mm on top of the video card combination to provide better cooling to the primary video card. See the pictures at the bottom of this page.

The keeper, who is at once gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or regret the burials. “You live on the dead, Lestiboudois!” the curie at last said to him one day. This grim remark made him reflect; it checked him for some time; but to this day he carries on the cultivation of his little tubers, and even maintains stoutly that they grow naturally. Since the events about to be narrated, nothing in fact has changed at Yonville. The tin tricolour flag still swings at the top of the church-steeple; the two chintz streamers still flutter in the wind from the linen-draper’s; the chemist’s fetuses, like lumps of white amadou, rot more and more in their turbid alcohol, and above the big door of the inn the old golden lion, faded by rain, still shows passers-by its poodle mane. On the evening when the Bovarys were to arrive at Yonville, Widow Lefrancois, the landlady of this inn, was so very busy that she sweated great drops as she moved her saucepans. To-morrow was market-day. The meat had to be cut beforehand, the fowls drawn, the soup and coffee made. Moreover, she had the boarders’ meal to see to, and that of the doctor, his wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was echoing with bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour were calling for brandy; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long kitchen table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was being chopped. From the poultry-yard was heard the screaming of the fowls whom the servant was chasing in order to wring their necks.