Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT 1GB
ATi / AMD isn't dead yet, and shows real promise for staying competitive with Nvidia

By the time you come to the last page of this review there will be little doubt that ATI is back in the videocard 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, (or is it ATI ?) has blitzed the market with a big red slice of silicon known as the Radeon HD 2900XT graphics processor. nVIDIA, which has gotten used to having free reign in the videocard market, must be sweating at the sight of Crossfire finally working with killer effectiveness.

In this review PCSTATS will be benchmarking a pair of Diamond Multimedia Viper Radeon HD 2900XT 1GB videocards, alone and in Crossfire at stock and overclocked speeds. If high end gaming is your past time, fragging at high framerates your Joi de Vive, PCSTATS has laid down seven frag-tastic pages of videocard benchmarks! Everything from synthetic 3DMark tests to DirectX9.0 and DirectX10 game titles are represented.

ATI, DirectX10 & Vista

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. DirectX 10 game titles like Crysis, Microsoft Flight Simulator X and Unreal Tournament 3 are still on the horizon, rather than being old hat before it even launched the Radeon HD 2900XT graphics card. Consumer demand for DirectX 10 compatible videocards is only set to ramp up from now on.

Nothing gets the juices flowing more than a couple of top of the line videocards fresh out of the box. Diamond Multimedia is getting back into high end videocards, and what better way to reintroduce itself than by releasing a videocard based on AMD's blistering 720 million transistor Radeon HD 2900XT GPU, with a staggering 1GB of GDDR4 memory no less! It's ATI's absolute best technology available, and PCSTATS has two of these bad boys on the test bench today. Yes, we're happy campers. :) The ATI Radeon HD 2900XT VPU core runs at 743 MHz while the 1GB of GDDR4 memory hums along at a very sweet 2 GHz! In pairs, the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT is ATI Crossfire compatible on supporting motherboards.

You to can share in the joy of a flagship gaming experience, but with a retail price of $520 CDN ($499 USD, £243 GBP) per Radeon HD 2900XT1GPE videocard, it's not for the faint of heart. It takes two Diamond 2900XT1GPE videocards to enable Crossfire; I'm sure you can do the math on that.

Diamonds' retail package includes two DVI to analog converters, a Component output cable, a S-Video/Composite VIVO cable, a DVI to HDMI adapter and one CrossFire Bridge connector. The Diamond Viper videocard PCSTATS tested did not come with any games, but then again only Company of Heroes and a couple other demos can show off the videocard's DirectX 10 powers anyway.

Read all about it here, courtesy of pcstats.com

Eric