With about eight months of delays, AMD finally launches its new high-level grpahics card. Curiously, it is not set to beat all performance records but to fight against the GeForce 8800 GTS of nVidia (both are sold around 399$). Nonetheless, it will be necessary to wait for the future tests. As a matter of fact, the results published today on various web sites are very astonishing: The card is sometimes very powerful, sometimes slow as molasses (with no understandable pattern); Performance in CrossFire mode (associating two cards in a single PC) is desperately near to one card only; You have to understand that the drivers are not finished at all and that we need to wait for one or two more versions to see what the card can produce (this is utterly abnormal situation, but we can only suppose that the HD 2900 XT 512Mb will be as fast as the GeForce 8800 GTS 640Mb -or even better).
However, it is already clear that the power drawn and the heat produced are properly extraordinary. It is a 2-PCIe-slot card with a noisy cooling fan. But the first results show that the overclocking capability is very large.
We’ll be waiting for more information before judging the card.
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