Buying a HD 2900 XT

Gerb68

Does anybody know where I can purchase an HD 2900 XT with a Laser Card?
Preferably a Sapphire one or similar.
I see alot of them on UK sites but I don't have a Credit Card. I know Peats of Parnell Street have one by CeCube but I'm not sure if this is of good quality. Any help would be great.
I'm building a Crossfire PC and this is all I'm waiting on. So my head is well and truly done in.
At this Stage I'm thinking of going with an 8800 GTS 640. But I would like to get an HD 2900 XT.

Thanx for any help.

Ginger

Komplett take Laser

http://www.komplett.ie/k/search.aspx?q=2900+XT

But looks like none are in stock at the min

TerrorFirmer

Ginger wrote:

Komplett take Laser

http://www.komplett.ie/k/search.aspx?q=2900+XT

But looks like none are in stock at the min

They do? when did they start?

Ginger

Whoops .. looks like they stopped.. I thought they did but maybe that was a while ago

Gerb68

Theres also JETWAY Radeon HD 2900XT at Pixmania.
Are CeCube and Jetway far superiour to Sapphire,HIS,ASUS etc?

christophicus

Are you sure its not Gecube??? and not cecube? to be honst I really would go for the 640mb gts over the ati card.

nibble

Hardwareversand.de do bank transfer, and whatever peats have would be perfectly good it's just that you'll probably pay over the odds.

Gerb68

Sorry its GeCube(Head is that messed up).
And I found Hardwareversand.de expensive on delivery.

8T8

All high end cards like the 2900 or 8800 series are made in the same factory there is no difference in the hardware at all no matter if it is GeCube or Powercolour.

As for the 8800GTS vs the 2900XT well I actually just acquired a 2900XT and contrary to most reports it's not nearly as noisy as it's made out to be though you will hear it in use during quite moments of games.

The GPU offers roughly comparable performance to a GTS 640 but there are highs and lows with the card whereas the GTS is more consistent, Vista 32/64 bit performance is excellent vs very good 32-bit on NVDIA and poor 64-bit for NVIDIA. When you enable AA performance hurts with some games maybe drivers can fix that in the long run but it's hard to say.

Unless you have a specific reason for going with the 2900XT like I did for 64-bit support then the 8800GTS may be more your thing.

Gerb68

Thanx for some great advice 8T8. Sorry for taking so long to reply.
As I meant to say earlier I am building my first PC with which I am using a Crossfire motherboard (the P5W DH Deluxe). I have everything ready to build for a long time now and was about to buy an X1950XTX but waited for what seemed like eternity for the 2900XT or XTX hearing all sorts. Like everybody else including most reviewers I was disappointed. Especially when I could have purchased an 8800GTS yonks ago.
I thought it would be best to stick an ATI card in a Xfire motherboard(I'm also using OCZ 2Gb ATI Certified memory). Is this Best? I know I can use 8800GTS but would this matter a whole lot?
What about the 700 million transistors. Is this a plus? Would it be true that the HD 2900XT would get a whole lot better with better Drivers in the future?
Altough lately I'm doing alot more Gaming I'm leaning more to Using this card for Entertainment on my PC eventually hooking up to a large LCD or Plasma TV.
With these few things in mind do you still think I should go for the 8800GTS.
As for the Brand of Card. I was thinking Brands like Sapphire and ASUS would be more reliable than GeCube and Jetway as their that little bit more expensive.
Thanx for any help. Its much appreciated.

papu

got my card from hardwareversand it comes to 360 with shipping which isnt bad , dont forget about the free hl2 black box im 'in my 2900

Gerb68

Not to keep going on about it. But which Brand?

papu

club 3d

Gerb68

Is Piximania good to do buisness with?

uberpixie

Peats are selling a Gecube X2900XT for 390 Euro.

Not bad considering komplett sell them for a tenner cheaper ex shipping.

papu

HV still ends up cheaper WITH shipping :P

Gerb68

I ended up buying the GeCube from Peats today. The one on show was the last one. They said they were expecting a delivery of Graphics Cards next week but all the HD 2900XT are from GeCube.
They told me in March they were expecting a batch of PC Cases in and I still haven't seen them.
Thanx to all that helped.

8T8

Sorry for the somewhat belated reply as I know you have already made the purchase in reply to your questions;

No the make of motherboard has no bearing on the performance of the GPU, NVIDIA toyed with something like this with NVIDIA chipsets a while back but it bore no real beneficial result.

As for the ATI card getting better in the future it is very hard to say the card performs on par with a 8800GTS 640 in some games, almost reaches the 8800GTX in others even besting it but in others is not any better than an X1950XT.

ATI have said the drivers are still quite green and there is room for improvement but to be honest I don't think there is much more in there and at best they will stabilize performance so it is generally on par with the 8800GTS.

The very large size of the GPU is something that is bothering the GPU wizzkids on Beyond3D it is theorized maybe that ATI added in a lot of functionality for GP-GPU (using GPU for thing other than games) and/or the big features of the chip like the ring bus and 512-bit memory controller just didn't pay off in the end product.

Certain aspects of the chip are meant to be very good at Direct-X 10 better than NVIDIA but it will be a long time before we will know for certain and all the games so far have been patches to existing DX9 titles with less than stellar results.

The other final aspect is the Xbox 360 as the ATI built Xenos GPU in it shares some features with the Radeon HD series and some initial benchmarks with Xbox 360/PC ports shows it does better than NVIDIA so the ATI card way work out better with multi platform games whether they are sloppy ports or not.

Gerb68

Thanx again 8T8. appreciate the information.