ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB CrossFire

Review @ X-Bit Labs

Zitat

Diamond Viper HD 2900XT 1024MB GDDR4

It is clear that modern games do not need more than 512 megabytes of graphics memory even for extremely high display resolutions with enabled full-screen antialiasing. The increase of the memory frequency from 1650 to 2000MHz cannot be very profitable for a 512-bit memory bus, especially as the memory subsystem is not the main bottleneck in the R600 architecture. As a result, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB is only 4-5% ahead of its 512MB predecessor at best. More often, the two cards deliver similar performance.

[...]A CrossFire tandem made out of two ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT cards is quite a different thing. Costing about $800-1000, which is comparable to the price of a GeForce 8800 Ultra, this configuration outperforms the Nvidia solution across a number of applications. Our testing has shown that ATI CrossFire technology enjoys a solid support in Windows Vista, obviously due to the high-quality Catalyst driver for the new OS.

It’s only in four out of 23 cases that ATI/AMD’s multi-GPU technology failed to provide a performance growth in comparison with the single card. In the other games from our list the technology worked smoothly, increasing the speed up to 80-90%. We want to specifically note that the AMD CrossFire platform proved to be the only solution to ensure an acceptable speed at 2560x1600 resolution in Call of Juarez and Neverwinter Nights 2. Thus, if not the best solution in the $800 category, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire is a worthy rival to the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra. Its main drawback is the indecently high level of power consumption, about 320 watts in 3D mode, and it is very noisy, too. These two factors call for a roomy and well-ventilated system case and a high-wattage, expensive PSU.

hab auch gerade ein testsystem mit 2 GTX da. man kann SLI zwar aktivieren, aber es wird dann von der software (zb 3dmark) nicht erkannt. muss man einen 163er driver verwenden oder gibt es einen anderen trick?