Review Product Close Up

The 2900XT from Sapphire is quite a cool looking card. True, it's a bit gimmicky, but its angry red PCB and cooler with the curling, silver, spiky things look pretty good.

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The front of the card starts with the red, coaxial fan that draws air from the bottom of the case and pushes it through the plastic shroud.

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The air is then pushed over a large, centralised heatsink which as you can faintly see in the picture below is attached to the core using a single heatpipe. For an explanation on what heatpipes are and how they work, check out our glossary entry here.

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The air is then exhausted out of the back of the card where you can also see the twin DVI ports that accompany the exhaust grill.

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The "top" of the card has twin crossfire bridge connectors which allows for this card to be used in crossfire. It may also allow for future tri-crossfire support, but this is not implemented yet.

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At the other end of the card, there are two power connectors: one 6pin, and one 8pin. The 8pin supposedly allows overclocking of the 2900XT however as you can see here, it actually only adds two ground wires (this has been confirmed with Sapphire) and although it might add some extra stability, you should be able to overclock without. A little more is written about that here. We will also test this theory when it comes to overclocking this card.

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