Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB

The 'ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512mb' graphics card is currently one of the top of the range cards and is brilliant!

Graphics are brilliant and I can set game settings to "HIGH"!, Battlefield 2142 looks fantastic, combined with 2GB of RAM and 64bit OS and it copes with a lot! (All depends on what other bits you have in your system)

It's quiet when on idle, but the fan 'should' kick in to Fast speed when you begin pushing the card during gaming, this forces air over the chipset and with its built in exhaust system, instead of forcing the hot air out of the card and around the inside of your system, it forces the hot air out the back of your pc case, making the inside air cooler.

But due to the card large cooling design the card is rather large and one of the most heaviest cards I have ever come across, not ideal for small cramped computer systems (check before you buy!), It has a nice design (from Sapphire), and makes any case look the part.

Being ATI you can have two of these cards running using 'Crossfire', although I haven't tried this, I think that even myself with a large computer case would struggle to fit two of these monsters side by side - One of the problems being that due to their size the air space required to cool the top card is restricted and will eventually lead to overheating issues! - To overcome this some have forced apart the cards just enough to allow room, but put strain on the card contacts and the motherboards PCI-e slots, which is NOT recommended. (Bit of a concerning oversight by ATI!)

Although early days this card is stated to become better given some more time when Direct X 10 is unleashed, haven't read into this but I'm looking forward to it.

Regarding POWER... yes this card is exactly as I have stated... HUNGRY... The minimum requirement is around 600W, of "Stable" power (and that's just for the one card, you will need around 800W odd for Two cards to run.

I used the word "Stable", due to the fact that it is most commonly believed that a 600W device will run on a 600W Power Supply Unit (PSU), unfortunately this is not the case as most PSU's advertised will run at 600W but that is their maximum output and most can not sustain such an output for a long period of time, instead they will usually run at a constant output of at least 80-100W below their stated maximum (I.e. a 600W PSU will run at around 520W odd), I may be wrong but this is the research I have been able to find).

I found this out the hard way after blowing one expensive £100 PSU, another fact to include is, although the device you are going to power will require 600W, you have to include all the other hardware you have in your system,(E.g. Hard Drive, Floppy Drive, DVD drive, Motherboard, Sound Card, Fans, Lights, Multi-card reader, etc) all of these items require a set amount of power!

After my expensive mistake I opted for an 800W PSU, although being 200W more than required I left myself enough leeway to allow for my other items in my system and a bit of Wattage to spare.

Enough about power requirements, now on to HEAT, this card does pump out the heat and in a small PC room it can help to do a bit of energy saving too, it does come in handy to pump out the hot air to heat your room, It runs at around 50 degrees when on idle, (depending on you case design and cooling components) ATI cards do have a tendency to develop faults by which it does run HOT, (believed to be something to do with the software programming which deals with managing the fan speed when the card gets hotter) More common on older ATI graphics cards, although owning mine for around 3 - 4 months I have had no problems so far.

An additional exhaust fan or even better a device which bring air into the PC just below the graphics card would be an advantage for keeping the device cool. (When things get hot, things can become slower to attempt to reduce the heat).

ATI drivers and software to configure the device are easy to use, and can be used by almost anyone, one download is for the actual driver, and a second download is for the software to manage the driver, both available off the ATI website, and simple to install. Once installed the device can be setup easily using the basic setup or for more advanced users who like to tweak their cards to get the most out of them, they can adjust about anything they wish to. That said, it did take a short wile to get used to them after switching from NVIDIA - which seem to be slightly easier to understand.

Performance - well this card is fantastic, and can handle with high work loads, although for comparisons I would suggest going to Google and doing a search, to see what others recommend as there are some extensive experiments been carried out, which give reasonably accurate results on how well this card performs - at the moment it is suggested that TWO NVIDIA top of the range cards in SLI mode, will beat TWO ATI 2900XT cards in Crossfire mode, (I really don't know much about this so I would do your research prior to deciding), that said people have stated that when Direct X 10 is released the full potential of the 2900XT card range will be unleashed and it is rumoured by 'some' to beat anything NVIDIA have currently on the market. (Feel free to argue amongst yourselves, just keep me out of it!)

Price - this card is on the expensive side, but being one of the Top of the range brands it is going to be expensive!, "You get what you pay for", My theory on buying a graphics card was to but one cheap - mid range priced card and stick to it until I have to change! (putting up with poor graphics and slow performance), now I have learned that by buying Top of the range, although expensive, you don't have to keep buying new graphic cards as often, and you avoid all the problems of games not being compatible (for a long while at least!) Plus you get much more benefits, which is exactly what you want from a gaming PC!

For the money, this is a fantastic card, easy to setup, performs well under high loads, does require a lot of power (I would suggest around 800W), and can become very hot after extensive gaming sessions (also suggested is an additional cooling device), some may argue that it's noisy but I can't say I find it loud. Only aspect that concerns me is that it's large and must be secured to the case tightly or it may put a lot of pressure on the PCI-e slots (which is not a good thing!).

Which is best ATI or NVIDIA?, well this is an argument which has and will rage for years to come!! - do a bit of research to see which is currently the best on the market, plenty of stats out there to see which performs better with different games.