Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 XT

As we've already mentioned, Sapphire's Radeon HD 2900 XT board follows ATI's reference specification to the letter, displaying the same core and memory clock speeds (740MHz and 825MHz respectively), as well as the same dual-slot cooler.

We can see the 9.5 inch Radeon HD 2900 XT board above, complete with that hefty, flame imbued cooler.

The rear of the board contains an elaborate heat spreader to cool the memory chips on the rear of the card, as well as acting as a retainer for the cooler.

CrossFire is supported by this board as per other newer ATI boards, courtesy of two inter-GPU connectors to connect the two boards together on suitable motherboards.

While the Radeon HD 2900 XT will operate perfectly well using two six-pin PCI Express power connectors, to enable ATI's OverDrive overclocking mode requires a power supply featuring the new eight-pin PCI Express power connector to provide the required level of power to run stably at higher clock speeds.  Thankfully, the eight-pin connector has been designed in such a way that an older six-pin connector can only be plugged in one way - The correct way.  This should save users from any nightmares of blowing up their expensive new graphics boards.

We see that dual-slot cooler properly in our profile shot, where we can also note that any heat generated by the GPU should be expelled outside of the case via the vent in the board's second slot.  As far as connectivity is concerned, we have full VIVO capabilities on offer here, together with two dual-link DVI ports...

...ports which, using the provided dongle, can be quickly and easily converted to HDMI connectors, complete with both video and audio capabilities.

Above we can see the object of those 700 million transistors - R600 in all its 45 degree rotated glory.

The memory on this board comes courtesy of Hynix's HY5RS573225A FP-1 GDDR3 modules rated at 1 nanosecond, which should make these modules theoretically capable of reaching 1GHz given the right voltages, suggesting that we may well have some impressive overclocking headroom on the RAM side of things.

Bundle and packaging

Now we've examined the board, let's see how it's boxed up and bundled to appear on retail shelves.

"He's behind you!" - Sorry, just having a pantomime moment there, what with the ominous face of Gordon Freeman sneaking up behind Sapphire's demon man.  Why is he there?  Because a voucher for the Half-Life 2 'Black Box' is included of course, giving you access to Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2 upon their release.

The rear of the packaging makes further mentioned of the aforementioned Valve bundle, as well as a list of recent awards won by Sapphire and some of the product's highlights.

All in all the bundle with Sapphire's offering is a pretty full-on one - Aside from the board we have two DVI to VGA converters, one DVI to HDMI converter, a couple of VIVO cables, a single CrossFire inter-GPU connector, manual, driver disc, Cyberlink software CDs, a copy of 3DMark06 and that all-important Valve 'Black Box' voucher.  You shouldn't be left wanting for much with that little collection, that's for sure.