Installation

Although the 2900 is still quite a long card, it isn't long enough to overlap the edge of the motherboard, so it poses no problems during installation.

Testing

Due to requests from our members, our testing this time has been a bit more in depth. We ran several synthetic and real world gaming tests at different resolutions and with different amounts of Anti Aliasing and Anistropic Filtering.

The synthetic tests we ran were as follows: 3Dmark06, 3Dmark05, 3Dmark03; all at default settings.

The settings of the synthetic tests were as follows:

X3 Reunion @ Default
X3 Reunion @ Full detail, 1280*1024, 8xAA, 16xAF
HL2: Lost Coast @ All settings at full, no AA, AF, 1280*1024
HL2: Lost Coast @ All settings at full, 1280*1024, 6x AA, 16x AF
FEAR @ All settings at max, 1280*1024
FEAR @ All settings at max, 1600*1200

The test rig we used was as follows:

Conroe E6600 @ 3.156ghz
MSI P6N-Diamond
2gb OCZ Flex 6400 @ 900mhz
Silver Power 600w

Overclocking

It has been said that this card requires a 6pin connector and an 8pin connector in order for overclocking to work properly when in fact this only stops you using the Catalyst overclocking tool. You can however still use the AMD GPU Clock Tool v0.7 which I was able to use to overclock this card from its stock, to a fairly respectable 800mhz on the core and 980mhz on the memory.

You can download AMD Clock Tool from our pals over at TechPowerUp.