ATI has finally launched its highly anticipated graphics circuit R600 and the graphics card series Radeon HD 2900. There has been an almost unbearable wait for many, not the least those who are eager to overclock the new circuit. Someone told us that records are meant to be broken and that is what we’re going for in this overclocking article starring ATI’s new graphics card.

Unlike the NVIDIA G80 architecture, it’s been known for long that ATI is working on a DirectX 10 circuit based on a Unified Shader architecture. ATI designed Xenos for Microsoft and its next generation video game console Xbox 360 and there was no doubt thatthe next circuit would be even faster.

The card consists of 512MB GDDR3 512bits memory interface and is powered by the Radeon HD 2900XT GPU. The GPU clock is rated at 743 and memory clock at 828. That is 743/1656. The card is also HDCP compliant, this allows decoding of protected HD-DVD/BluRay titles with accompanying LCD TVs. HDTV display is also greatly enhanced with AVIVO HD with UVD reducing CPU utilisation.

The DVI ports are HDCP compatible (one DVI to HDMI adapter is included) so you can watch content at full HD resolution. Of course 5.1 audio is supported through the HDMI port for superior sound. If the TV in your computer room doesn’t have an HDMI port, don’t fret since the included cables have a component video plug set.

The ASUS EAH2900XT comes equipped with AMD’s latest ATI Radeon™ HD 2900XT GPU – which delivers powerful graphics performance, improved stability and an immersive HD gaming experience for Windows Vista™. The latest ATI Catalyst™ software is designed for quick setup of graphics, video and multiple displays; and automatically configures optimal system settings for lifelike DirectX® 10 gaming and visually stunning Windows Aero™ user interfaces.

Graphics GPU Features
- CrossFire Technology Ready: Unite multi-GPU with easy-to-use “plug-and-play” CrossFire™ configuration.
- Powered by the world’s most powerful GPU - ATI Radeon HD2900XT
- 512-bit memory interface
- High-speed 128-bit-HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering
- Built-in HDMI with Multi-channel 5.1 surround audio
- Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine-Support for Microsift® Direct X®10 and OpenGL 2.0
- Avivo™ Video and Display Engine

IO Specifications
- PCI-Express
- CrossFire Technology
- HDCP Compliant
- HDMI (from bottom DVI output)
- TV-Out
- HDTV-out
- Video-In
- Dual DVI-I
- Dual VGA

The ASUS EAH2900XT will be exclusively bundled with THQ and GSC Game World’s critically-acclaimed survival horror First-Person Shooter (FPS) game S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl. “S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl is a very visually engaging open-ended FPS, so the graphical portions of the game are very detailed and requires a graphics card with powerful performance and high quality to bring out the best portions of the game,” said Ian Curran, Senior Vice President of international publishing, THQ. “ASUS’s EAH2900XT is certainly up to the task, and THQ is pleased to bundle S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl with ASUS’s high-end performance graphics card.”

Popularity: 79% [?]

Asus EAX1600PRO/TD is equipped with exclusive ASUS innovations and ATI Radeon X1600PRO GPU and high-speed DDR3 memory. A powerful combination of the industry’s fastest PCI Express architecture and rendering pipeline (over 15% faster than generic RADEON X1600PRO Series), ASUS EAX1600PRO/TD is providing high quality, better performance, and affordable price. Incorporating exclusive technologies, such as ASUS Splendid, GameLive Show, GameReplay, and GameFace Messenger, ASUS EAX1600PRO/TD/ is a new and powerful model targeted to address the entry-level segment of the discrete desktop market. Asus EAX1600PRO/TD also will deliver exceptional quality and performance to the most demanding user for 3D games, streaming media, digital video, and office applications.

The EAX1600PRO/I/256M/A is a half-height card, which makes it well suited for installation into a standard size PC, or possibly a slim-line HTPC. With the GPU and memory both running at 400MHz, it doesn’t take much more than the small heatsink/fan to keep things running cool. I almost expect that Asus could have even gone so far as to employ a completely passive cooling method, which would have cut down on power consumption and noise output, but the setup as it is helped us out with overclocking, as you will see later on in the review. To keep things streamlined, 256MB of Infineon GDDR3 memory are placed towards the far end of the card, with 2 chips on each side.

Features: Powered by ATi Radeon X1600PRO GPU. 512M DDR2 on board memory with affordable price (EAX1600 PRO/TD/512M). 90 Nanometer Technology for better performance at lower price. New performance architecture makes Shader Model 3.0 features playable for the first time in the mainstream segment. Avivo Technology: revolutionary display, Video, and connectivity capabilities. Next-Generation image quality. Advanced high Dynamic Range rendering, 128-bit floating point precision.

Specifications: Graphics Engine: ATI Radeon X1600PRO. Video Memory: 512 MB DDR2. Engine Clock: 500MHz. Memory Clock: 540MHz(270MHz DDR2). RAMDAC: 400MHz. Bus Standard: 16 lanes PCI Express. Memory Interface: 128-bit. Max Resolution: 2048×1536. TV Output: Yes. VGA Output: Standard 15-pin D-sub. DVI Output: DVI-I. 2nd VGA Output: Yes, via DVI-to-VGA adaptor. Adaptor/Cable bundled: S-Video & composit cable. DVI-to-2nd VGA adaptor. 3D game bundle: King Kong Special Edition, Stylish CD leather Wallet.

Popularity: 94% [?]

You can tell plenty from the model code of this new MSI graphics card. The ‘NX8600GTS’ part tells you that it uses the new Nvidia GeForce 8600GTS graphics chip along with 256MB of fast GDDR-3 graphics memory, while the ‘OC’ suffix flags up the fact that this is a factory overclocked graphics card.Nvidia launched the DirectX 10 GeForce 8800 GT and GTX way back in October 2006 so this mid-range chip has been a long time coming. It’s given Nvidia time to move from a 90nm fabrication process to 80nm, so the GeForce 8600 uses faster clock speeds on the core, unified shaders and memory than we ever saw on the 8800. This gives us a taste of what we can expect when Nvidia launches the GeForce 8800 Ultra in a few weeks’ time to nicely mess up the launch of the ATi Radeon HD 2900.Getting back to the MSI, the GeForce 8600GTS chip uses 289 million transistors, compared to the GeForce 8800 which has 691 million. The graphics core runs at 700MHz, the 32 unified shaders are clocked at 1.45GHz and the 256MB of memory has a speed of 2.1GHz, yet the power rating is fairly low at 71W so there’s a single six-pin PCI Express power connector.

MSI calls this an overclocked card but the increase is fairly small as the reference core speeds for an 8600GTS are 675MHz for the core with 2GHz memory speed.

MSI has clearly given a fair amount of thought to the cooling on this model as the pictures we’ve seen of competing GeForce 8600GTS cards use a slim-line cooler that looks very similar to a GeForce 7800GTX. MSI has instead opted for a double-slot design that connects the heatsink to a finned radiator. The fan blows cooling air through a duct and across the cooler but there’s a sizeable gap between the heat exchanger and the vented bracket.

We suspect this design is intended to quieten the cooler, however it still seemed rather noisy to our ears and made a continuous drone that was rather off-putting.

The graphics card is bulky and noisy and the MSI package is rather basic. There’s a PCI-E power adapter, two DVI adapters, a splitter cable with Component and S-Video outputs and an S-Video extension cable. Apart from some MSI utilities there is no software in the games department where you would hope for, say, a voucher for Unreal Tournament 2007.

During our testing we compared the MSI with a GeForce 7950GT, as that is the DirectX 9.0c part that will inevitably be replaced by the GeForce 8600GT, so when we ran 3DMark06 and a few games on both cards in Windows XP and Windows Vista, we were surprised to find that the difference in performance was minimal.

Sure, there were swings and roundabouts, but you couldn’t say that either graphics card was better than the other, and for that matter both of the two operating systems delivered the goods. While the MSI is undoubtedly a very competent performer it came as a real surprise that it wasn’t markedly better than the card that it is due to replace.

The reason is, of course, DirectX 10.

The GeForce 8000 family all support DirectX 10 and use a new design that replaces dedicated Pixel Shaders, Vertex Shaders and Geometry Shaders with more flexible Unified Shaders. That’s a good move which will doubtless reap benefits once DirectX 10 games come to market, but that’s still some months in the future.

Popularity: 52% [?]

When Nvidia unleashed the mighty G80 core on an unsuspecting world, the first choruses of approval for the DirectX 10 capable card were dampened down by the fierce price tag it carried (around the £400 mark) for the high end 8800GTX.Even its less capable sibling, the 8800GTS, had a price of around £300. To try to make the card more attractive to the mainstream market and therefore sell more cards, Nvidia took the standard GTS with its 640MB of GDDR3 memory and halved it to produce the 8800GTS 320, with an appropriate drop in price.

Apart from the memory, the 320 is identical to the standard 8800GTS, with a 500MHz core clock and an 800MHz (effective 1,600MHz) memory clock running thorough a 320-bit memory interface.

Because of the new architecture of the G80, the pixel and vertex pipelines that we knew and loved have been replaced by unified shader technology which, in the case of the 8800GTS, consists of 96 stream processors running at 1,200MHz. Each of these stream processors can be dynamically allocated to geometry, vertex, pixel or physics operations.

To alleviate the performance lag that only having half the memory brings, Foxconn took the most obvious route and overclocked both the core and memory engine speeds, but unfortunately left the shader clocks at the standard GTS speeds. But what a speed increase: the 320 Overclocked Edition runs at standard 8800GTX speeds straight out of the box; 575MHz core and 900MHz (effective 1,800MHz) memory clocks.

So what does all that mean in performance terms? First up the synthetic testing with 3DMark06. Tested at a 1,280 x 1,024 pixel resolution, the GeForce 8800GTS 320 OE gave a score of 8,164, somewhat faster than Foxconn’s standard 8800GTS 320 which gave a score of 7,989, and not that far behind its 8800GTX at 10,537.

When it comes to real life games, the story is much the same between the two GTS 320 cards. The standard card gave frame rates of 83.1 and 108.54 in Doom 3 and Far Cry respectively, while the overclocked version produced frame rates of 90.8 and 11.76 for the same two games. To really push the cards we tested them both with F.E.A.R. and got average frame rates of 79 for the standard card and 90 for the overclocked one.

To make the card even more appealing, Foxconn has decided to go against the standard practice of bunging in a load of unwanted games with the 320 OE and instead bundled a USB 3D Game Pad and a couple of software utilities; RestoreIT v7 which is for making backups of your data, VirtualDrive Pro v10 which allows you to create up to 23 virtual optical drives and Virtual Hard Drive which uses part of the system memory to create a RAM disk.

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