AMD R600XT Shows Promise
05.14.07 - 04:34pm
Before R600 even got out the door individuals were slandering it’s name due to the lengthy(5 months?) delays that this chip went through to make it to the market. AMD toted R600 as the super GPU to beat all other GPUs but when users finally got their hands on the chips they were less than impressed. Considering how G80 from Nvidia had been on the market for the last 7 months, AMD was sorely late to the party. However when R600 failed to even beat the 8800GTX, everyone lost hope in R600. The R600XT, commonly known as the HD 2900XT, sadly won’t be a competitor to the 8800GTX however it is a great competitor to the 8800GTS which it is priced to compete against.
The limited results that I have seen show that the 8800GTS 640MB seems to trade blows with the 2900XT while the 8800GTX and 8800Ultra reign supreme in all but a few tests. Anandtech has done an amazing job with their review covering both CrossFire and single-GPU tests and comparing the 2900XT to a nice field of competitors (8800GTS, X1950, 8800GTX, 8800U) and is a worthy read. VR-Zone has performed another thorough review featuring cascade cooling on a single 2900XT and 1GHz+ core clocks. Over at XtremeSystems both Kinc and ZoLKoRn have posted up some initial results, Kinc’s 1143MHz on the GPU is absolutely stunning, albeit on an cascade. ZoLKoRn also does a great job with 850MHz on the stock cooler, it looks like the 2900XT scales very well with cooling. I suspect when a few of the 3D professional tweakers get their hands on the 2900XT we could see some 1200/1200 runs in crossfire and perhaps a few world records.
Right now I can’t really recommend the 2900XT to anyone but a 3D bencher, besides consuming a lot of power the card doesn’t perform all that well compared to a slightly cheaper 8800GTS 640MB. Newegg has the 2900XT for the low $400 range while the 640MB GTS is running in the mid to upper $300, the GTS is cheaper and lands on top in most instances. If you are into overclocking that can drastically change your decision but remember that the 2900XT can easily eat through 250 watts of power, more than my processor and memory under full load @ 4.2GHz. I think everyone can agree that the 65nm refresh of the 2900XT that will occur over the summer will be greatly appreciated, perhaps AMD can drop power consumption to below 200 watts.
Meh. I’ve been waiting for 4 months for the ATi card to blow nVidia’s 8800GTX’s out of the water. God dammit.
Well if you happen to have a cascade lying around then R600XT looks interesting, otherwise it leaves me feeling letdown. Guess we have to hope that drivers will unlock some untapped performance.