Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB
Just prior to the Radeon HD 2000 series' introduction, numerous rumors circulated regarding an ultra-high clocked ATI R600-based video card, that featured a large 1GB frame buffer. Some went so far as to say the GPU would be clocked at or near 1GHz. Spy shots even cropped up on the web showing the card in all its glory. But sometime between then and the official launch, news of the card fizzled and when the R600 arrived in the form of the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT, it was outfitted with “only” 512MB of frame buffer memory and its GPU core and memory clock speeds, while somewhat high, didn’t come close to the numbers put forth in those early rumors.
Some of AMD’s partners, however, have since decided to introduce R600-based products that show there was actually some truth to the stories that circulated early on. The product we’re going to show you here today for example, the Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB, is based on the R600 GPU, but as its name implies the card features not 512MB of frame buffer memory but a full 1GB. The memory on the card is also clocked higher than AMD’s reference ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT’s at 1GHz (2GHz DDR). The GPU clock remains at 742MHz, however.
We got our hands on a pair of these 1GB monsters and have compared their performance to the original 512MB Radeon HD 2900 XT, and a trio of GeForce 8800 series cards, all running in both single- and multi-GPU CrossFire and SLI configurations with some interesting results.
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700 million transistors on 80nm HS fabrication process
512-bit 8-channel GDD4 memory interface Ring Bus Memory Controller
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10.0
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
Anti-aliasing features
CrossFire Multi-GPU Technology
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Texture filtering features
ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform
PCI Express x16 bus interface OpenGL 2.0 support
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Diamond bundles their Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB with a typical assortment of accessories for an HD 2000 series graphics card. Included with the Viper were two DVI-to-VGA adapters, a single DVI-to-HDMI w/ audio adapter, component video output cables, a ViVo dongle with S-Video and composite inputs and outputs, and a single CrossFire bridge connector. In addition to these items we also found a driver CD and some basic documentation. Finally, there was also a coupon for Valve’s Black Box gaming bundle (now called Orange box) that features Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. And unlike the original HL2 / Radeon bundle, Orange box isn’t going to take forever to arrive. In fact, news broke recently that it has gone gold and should be available soon.
