AMD's own user guide suggests a 750W PSU and you can read it
here but we tested and figured out that a single Radeon HD 2900XT works with a
quality 500W as well. However it won't work with every 500W PSU, especially not
with the cheap ones.
We won't go much into the architecture, as we wrote about it
before but it is important to mention that ATI chip has 64 Shader units and
they can deal with Vec5 scalar functions. ATI and a few developers claim that
R600 has a much better geometry Shader than Nvidia but this is a DirectX 10
feature only and there are no any DirectX 10 games to put this claim to the test.
One other interesting thing is the DVI to HDMI dongle that
should be able to take care of Audio but we didn’t had a chance to play with
this much.
ATI has a few drives but the launch one is called 8.364, however we also learned that 8.374a and b were available to a few of reviewers. There
should be a 8.378 that can improve the performance for additional five percent
but this is yet to be seen.
The card has two PCIe power connectors one 4×2 pin for
overdrive overclocking while the second one is the standard 3×2 pins. The card
will work with two 3×2 pin connectors, but the driver wont recognize the
overdrive overclocking option.
Finally the card has an internal Crossfire connector and it
looks identical to the ones we saw on RV570 based Radeon X1950 PRO cards.
The
package includes two DVI dongles, DVI to HDMI dongle, HDTV cable and Avivo
analogue cables.
Let's not forget the Crossfire internal connector. The package also includes the Voucher for Half
Life 2 episode 2, team fortress 2 and portal games. You can also play Day of
Defeat source game when you buy this card and unfortunately this is the only
game that is actually out.
