After hearing yesterday that HIS has launched its Radeon HD 2900 Pro graphics card, it now seems that GeCube is doing the same. Although there is no page on GeCube's website about the new graphics card yet, numerous European stores are listing a GeCube Radeon 2900 Pro 512MB card for pre-order, with prices varying from €226 - €231 ($313 - $320 US). Presumably the specs will be similar to those of the HIS model, with 320 unified shader processors at 600MHz and 512MB of GDDR3 memory at 1600MHz. However, over at X-bit labs they're speculating that it might use a 256-bit memory bus width compared to the 512-bit of the HIS offering, although nothing has been confirmed yet and it's more likely than not that both of the cards would have the same bus width. AMD is still yet to comment over the HD 2900 Pro, although undoubtedly it'll have to give an official announcement soon given that manufactures have already starting listing the card.

The Inquirer is claiming that they have some benchmark scores to disclose with AMD's K10. They say that it was running on the RD790 chipset, with two HD 2900 XT cards, and some Corsair's Dominator PC2-9136C5D. They clocked it at 3.0 GHz with the video cards clocked at 830 MHz for the GPU and 900MHz for the memory. They ended up with a score of 30,031 in 3DMark06 a new world record if true. They didn't point out what kind of cooling was used, but if it was just your standard heatsink. Expect even higher scores to be reached after their release.

According to the guys over at Chilehardware, ATI is preparing the HD 2900 Pro graphics card, which should hit the market in Q4 2007. The new card uses the same R600 core as HD 2900 XT and must fulfil the gap between NVIDIA's 8600GTS and 8800GTS 320MB. The price should be close to USD $200. The main reason to believe that this card is reality is found in a recent beta driver.

"ATI Radeon HD 2900 PRO" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9403

It seems that PCMagazine has gotten their hands on a "special" version of the Radeon HD 2900XT in a Crossfire setup which nearly DOUBLES performance across some games and benchmarks over NVIDIA's 8800 GTX SLI.

The systems they used were direct from Falcon Northwest and so the question is... what about the rest of us? The folks over at Dailytech provide their insight into this interesting find in an editorial.

The NDA for the R600 was finally lifted around an hour ago and manufacturers are already spreading the news. Danger Den is first here to show their upcoming R600 full size water block. As the HD 2900 XT draws a lot of power (around 215W AMD/ATI announced) a water block does make a lot of sense. The cooler is two parted, along with the GPU chip, the memory and voltage regulators on the fron, it cools the memory chips at the backside of the card as well.
The name of that cooling beast and it's price is still to be uncovered, check back this week, we will have the scoop then.

Many people out there who are keen on getting one of AMDs R600 cards already have a watercooling setup I guess. Other people who plan to purchase such a card might plan on going the watercooling road as well and for these people the following note is highly interesting. The metal shim around the HD 2900XT cards is taller than the core, not flush nor is the opposite the case. Take a close look at the pictures below, some of you might have thought the core is raised higher than the shim by mistake. To proof the stated fact following a quote of Shamino from VR-Zone:

too bad the shim around the GPU is taller than the core

If you plan to use a water cooler in order to cool the card, which makes sense according to the preliminary thoughts regarding power consumption, you should double check if your cooler fits onto the card. It has to be either very narrow or needs a recess to be milled on it following the outer edge to some degree. Shown on the last picture is the DangerDen MAZE5 GPU block which served such recess in order to be compatible to the first X800 cards. The last solution would be to remove the shim, which will void the warranty of course.

The next R600 based HD 2900XT graphics card finally made it to the Internet. MSI's yet to be a launched top model posed nude and in all it's glory while being photographed by the talented folks from coolaler.com. Please excuse that we can only post the harmless pictures at our frontpage.

On May 14th, six days from now, the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) regarding AMDs HD 2000 graphics card lineup will be lifted and everyone will be informed about it by various websites and print magazines. As this day comes closer and closer more and more bits of information and misinformation get published around the internet. The VR-Zone seems to have a comprehensive article in the works right now, judging on the traces they left on their website. There you will find headlines but no pictures or additional text about HD 2400, HD 2600 and HD 2900 products and even one about mobile graphics solutions called Radeon Mobility 2000 Series. Furthermore there is evidence about DirectX 10 demos, special antialiasing modes, Overclocking and 'UnReal Overclocking' - whatever that means. Interestingly there isn't a chapter dedicated to a HD 2900 XTX yet.
Of course we here at techPowerUp! will have a decent review online by May 14th, but don't expect us to come up with a similar approach like the VR-Zone in the meantime.

As we reported to you earlier today, HIS Digital recently updated their website with the online product presentation of their upcoming HIS Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB GDDR3 VIVO PCIe graphics card. It seems like HIS took the website down now but we still have all the pages for your viewing pleasure.

PICTURES HAVE BEEN REMOVED AT REQUEST OF HIS

HIS - Hightech Information System Limited jumped the gun when preparing their website for the upcoming AMD R600 graphics cards. The following link leads to their online product presentation website for the HIS Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB GDDR3 VIVO PCIe and pretty much confirms nearly all the rumors we heard about this particular chip during the last few weeks and months.

IMAGES AND INFORMATION REMOVED AT REQUEST OF HIS

After impressive benchmark results for the Radeon HD 2900 XT, the Radeon HD X2900 XTX (AMD's flagship DirectX 10 card) has failed to impress in the same way. When compared to NVIDIA's 8800 GTX, the 2900 XTX is lagging behind in frames per second when it comes to games such as Company of Heroes, F.E.A.R., Half Life 2: Episode 1 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You can see the results for yourself (as well as pictures of the card) by clicking the images below - all tests were run on an ASUS P5N32-E SLI motherboard with a Core 2 Extreme QX6800 processor and 800MHz Corsair XMS2 RAM. The HD 2900 XTX is based on the same GPU as the HD 2900 XT, but uses GDDR4 memory running at 1010MHz instead of GDDR3 memory running at 800MHz. There aren't any comparisons between the cards when they are overclocked, nor is there any data on DirectX 10 performance, but at present it looks like NVIDIA could be a step ahead of AMD. The card used by DailyTech was a sample released to board members in the second week of April, and the benchmarks were made with the drivers AMD plans to provide when the new cards hit retail.

The title speaks for itself. DailyTech has managed to run through some benchmarks with the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB graphics card. The tests were conducted on an Intel D975XBX2 BadAxe2, Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and 2x1GB DDR2-800 MHz. The operating system on the test system was Windows XP, with a fresh install before benchmarking each card. Testing of the AMD ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT was performed using the 8.361 Catalyst RC4 drivers, while the GeForce 8800 GTS used ForceWare 158.19 drivers. All game tests were run with the maximum detail settings at resolutions of 1280x1024.The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is expected to be widely available in mid-May, with a suggested retail price of $499.

Fudzilla claims that the Radeon HD 2900 manages an impressive 102.4GB/s memory throughput. The card uses a 512 bit memory interface and 1600 MHz GDDR3 memory. The core was clocked at 800 MHz. For comparison, NVIDIA's G80 with its odd 384 bit memory controller scores 86.4 GB/s.

The new HD 2900 XTX with GDDR 4 memory clocked at 2200 MHz, as originally planned, can theoretically have 140.8 GB/s. Both cards have twice or close to twice more memory bandwidth from ATI's Radeon X1950XTX card. This card was limited to a now modest 64GB/s.

Editors note: The NDA on the R600 makes it impossible for anyone to release accurate benchmarks of the R600. In fact, the NDA is so strict, we'll be lucky if the leaked R600 pictures have any accuracy. The theoretical memory bandwidth was attained by simple math: 512bit * 1600MHz / 8bit = 102.4GB/s.

Fudzilla was the most hasty again in disclosing the name of the new high end Radeon branded cards. There won't be a X2000... card, but instead, the name will be HD 2900.... So the first one off the line, that will make it to the market, will be the Radeon HD 2900XT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory.