"We You Were Young" by The Killers from Sam's Town

Conclusion:

Asus EAH 2900 XT

The Asus branded HD 2900 XT is without doubt the best overall package we have ever seen for a graphics card. The inclusion of every required cable and connector surpasses expectations and the box gives more than enough information on the product inside. With regards to software we were hugely impressed and even though some of it may very well go unused by the buyer, the two highlights are the full version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and a voucher to purchase various Steam games when they become available (Half Life 2: Ep 2 anyone?). This almost guarantees hours of enjoyment with several high quality games without the need to spend any further cash. It’s also nice to see Asus making a little effort with the styling of the card which adds another unique selling point to the package.

Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 XT

Sapphires take on the 2900 XT comes in the form of a well rounded product. Most of the essentials are included although we would have liked to have seen at least 1 molex to 6pin power converter cable. Sapphire probably feel that anyone building a system should have a high spec PSU anyway and we would tend to agree so the lack of cables isn’t anything more than a minor issue. The inclusion of PowerDVD 6 allows end users to take advantage of the 2900’s high quality video output (128 out of 130 in the HQV benchmark) however as we noted earlier it would have been ideal to bundle a version which fully supports HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.

The HD2900XT Overall

In business it is always a good idea to learn from your mistakes and it also makes sense to learn from the mistakes of your competitors. It seems like AMD have not done so and throughout our experience with the card it has reminded us on more than a few occasions of the Geforce FX. Why?

First off the 2900XT is hugely late to market and as a result has trouble competing with an already well established part. In fact overall the XT is slower than the GTS when it matters. Next up we have the noise levels, don’t get us wrong, the 2900 isn’t anywhere near as loud as the FX was (thank god) however it is much louder than the competition. Whether watching movies or playing games the fan regularly speeds up and the variation in noise levels makes it incredibly difficult to mentally tune out. In this day and age there is no excuse for a noisy cooler on a high end card, Nvidia have very competently demonstrated how to create excellent cooling systems. The impact this has on the enjoyment of any task which involves audio is substantial.

Clearly AMD must have known that the XT was not going to beat the GTS and with the delays in launch they had time to rethink the product and add some unique selling points. One such point could have been the inclusion of full high definition video decoding such as that which will be featured in lower spec 2000 series products. Instead we have a card which when combined with any CPU other than the fastest available (high end dual core conroe) struggles with 1080p content. Even when trying to implement unique features things didn’t go well. The HDMI out with audio and video is a good idea in theory and it does work however we can’t recommend putting this card anywhere near the main TV in any house due to the noise issues mentioned above. It is just too intrusive.

We also can’t finish this review without mentioning that we had quite a nightmare finding AMD motherboards with onboard graphics which accepted the card without issue. AMD have investigated this issue however at this time it is unresolved (and unrepeatable within AMD) so we will reserve judgement on the issues which ranged from the Standard VGA driver not installing correctly (Minor) to the board failing to display the BIOS (major) and even on occasion not booting into windows at all.

All is not lost with the product though. Most of our main issues can be fixed by two changes; the first is a complete redesign of the cooling solution to create one which is as quiet, if not more so than it’s main competitors and the second is a drop of the retail price by at least £50 or $75 (from RRP $399) to compensate for the fact that overall the card is slower and has less memory than the nearest competition (The Geforce 8800 GTS 640Mb). If AMD or its partners can do both the Radeon HD becomes a much more attractive purchase, as it stands now however, we simply cannot recommend this hardware.