Advantages: excellent memory capacity, improved games performance Disadvantages: GDDR3 instead of GDDR4
░▒▓ SAPPHIRE RADEONHD2900XT ▓▒░
In my view, there is nothing more important on a high powered entertainment PC than a graphics card that will give you the performance that you deserve for running high speed and highly detailed and memory intensive games.
I recently decided to upgrade my graphics card to a Sapphire RadeonHD2900XT, and I am so glad I did. My graphics when playing games are now so much better. The card is very well built with a pretty red design on top. One thing that I am surprised about is that with the advent of a new era in memory following the creation of GDDR4 memory, that they have settled for only GDDR3 memory for this card. On top of that, there is only 512mb on the card in comparison to some of the latest cards which have around 640mb. Other than that ...
Advantages: Great speed, efficient cooling system, impressive specifications Disadvantages: High power consumption, 8800 GTX is faster
▀ ▀ ▀ A small introduction to the 2900XT(R600) family. ▀ ▀ ▀
The 2900XT family is the first video cards family created for PC market and designed by ATI based on Microsoft unified shader Direct3D 10 Shader Model 4.0 / OpenGL 2.0 architecture.It is ATI's second generation unified shader design, based on the "Xenos" GPU implemented in the Xbox 360 game console, which used the world's first such shader architecture.Boosting 700 million transistors on 80nm HS fabrication process (by comparision ,Intel best dual core processor intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 has "only" 291 million transistors) and having 320 stream processing units this card surpassed the latest king the ATI Radeon X1900XTX but it still behind of NVIDIA top product the 8800 GTX.
►►►The card: ASUS EAH2900XT/G/HTVDI ◄ ...
Advantages: Can run almost every game on highest settings, easy to overclock, very good memory speed. Disadvantages: No PhsX so some games can't run properly or even at all sometimes, some old games dont work.
The XFX ATi RadeonHD 4870 1024MB GDDR5, is undoubtedly one of the best cards you can buy within it's price range (to name a few the Nvidia GTX 260, the Nvidia GTS 250 and the ATi 4850) it is able to play almost every modern game at highest settings at a playable speed. I say almost because because some games require Nvidia PhsX, and I say modern because some old games don't work on the graphics card, Quake III for example. Although Deus Ex Works, as do all of Valves games and Diablo II does, but it has graphical issues and can mess up the placement of your windows.
Visuals
Almost every game that I own I can run at highest settings with a flawless framerate, Crysis runs at about 20 FPS which is playable but not exactly flawless. It still looks absolutely amazing though and you completely forget the bad gameplay ...
The HIS Radeon HD 2900XT unleashes the power of DirectX 10 with awesome performance, stunning visual effects and more dynamic interactivity than ever before. Surpass reality with easy CrossFire scalability, built-in HDMI and 5.1 surround audio for an immersive HD Gaming experience. HIS Radeon HD 2900XT delivers ultimate realism and performance at all resolutions in high dynamic range from a 2nd generation unified shader engine.
