HEXUS.reviews :: HIS Radeon HD 2900 XT - R600

[Tarinder]

AMD brings it on with the R600. Savour or sinner?

Find out more.

[SiM]

Thanks for the review!

dedicated Universal Video Decoder (UVD), present on both HD 2600 and 2400 series, does the whole job, internally, on a dedicated processor, leaving the CPU and GPU to do other wonderful things.... but watching a frenetic 1080p demo run off a HD 2600 card, CPU utilisation hovered at around 15 per cent.

Thanks, really wanted to know about this!!! Will get one of these mid/low range ones in my next HTPC

All HDCP-compliant ports will also offer dual-link compatibility, too. Great for you Dell, Apple and HP 30in panel owners, all 50 of you.

you can get these for £550 now, so I'm sure there is probably more than 50... There is probably 50 Hexus members with a 30in panel

[Tarinder]

Hehe,

I guess that's just jealousy

UVD actually lives up to the hype and makes a lot of sense.

[YorkieBen]

nice review

interesting to see how overclockable the card was, and how much it benefitted from the extra memory bandwidth.

When the GDDR4 card comes out with 2ghz memory (a la X1900XTX) it will be interesting to see the performance levels

[DR]

you can get these for £550 now, so I'm sure there is probably more than 50... There is probably 50 Hexus members with a 30in panel

I suspect the 550 ones are refurbs and the HDCP doesn't work on them properly like the first set of 30" Panels from Dell

[SiM]

I suspect the 550 ones are refurbs and the HDCP doesn't work on them properly like the first set of 30" Panels from Dell

Yes they are refurbs. 3007-HCs though. Well if HDCP doesn't work, it has 30 day warranty

I didn't get one personally, I'd rather get the 2407-HC when it comes out. 30" is too much for a student room.

[DR]

Yes they are refurbs. 3007-HCs though. Well if HDCP doesn't work, it has 30 day warranty

I didn't get one personally, I'd rather get the 2407-HC when it comes out. 30" is too much for a student room.

Nice

[chuckskull]

Suprised how little the the advantage over a 8800GTS(available for £140 in a few places) is even at higher resolutions. Then again theres a lot of speculation that the next driver revision will bring a 40% performance increase in most cases. Have to wait and see I guess. Nice review.

[Ferral]

Nice review, interesting to see what ATI have under their hats for mid range and the possibility of a higher clocked top end card that will take on the mighty 8800 Ultra.

Any ideas on the DX10 benchmarks and performance yet? Would be interesting to see how the DX10 ATI and Nvidia cards do under a Vista DX10 environment.

Lost Planet demo is out tommorow which is DX10 and Vista, also there is an update for Call of Juarez making it DX10 (not sure on a date with this one however).

[Tarinder]

Ferral,

Yup, DX10 testing is on the cards (ho, ho, ho). We've just got the COJ Benchmark and are prepping up the test rig now. I'd love to have included it all in one piece, but time ran short.

LP looks good too.

[Ferral]

It was a really good and large review and I guess it could have made it a bit OTT cramming so much in.

Can't wait to see if it fares better under the DX10 environment, never know it may be right up there with the 88 series of cards. Also how does it compare to the X1950 XTX card in Vista seeing as the previous generation is DX9.

Sorry for all the questions, just think it is a big jump from DX9 to DX10 and Vista etc. Always good to know where things are heading from a technical and gaming standpoint.

[SiM]

Usually theres already too much about gaming in these reviews we don't need any more

Why not have an extended test of UVD on the 2400 and 2600?

I know these cards are primarily for gaming - this was a half joke... But it would be nice to see some more testing for the non-gamer population(i.e UVD)

[kalniel]

*sighs* and I thought DX10 was meant to be the end of API specific features

AMD go and put programmable tesselation in there. It didn't work for Truform so why's it going to work for 2k?

[Tarinder]

Kalniel,

Because Microsoft has strongly hinted that it will be a part of DX11.

[SiM]

Tarinder,
Do you know if the HDMI is HDMI1.3?

I can't see it mentioned in any review

Thanks

[drunkenmaster]

Tarinder, i might of missed it but do the boxes come with 6 to 8 pin pci-e adpator, or a molex to pci-e thing at all?

hmm, also do you know where will have stock today. i'm loathe to again pay over the odds because OCUK seem to screw everyone. beg distributors to give them all the stock first few days so they can ramp up prices and charge more. a couple years ago this meant bad prices for 2 weeks, but now every other company lets them do this, then just charge the same higher price and prices don't come down after 2 weeks anymore.

its bad enough that rip off britain is expensive for NO reason in the first place, but then retailers screw us further?