More HD 2900 XT details

The HD 2900XT is equipped with a large dual slot cooling device. A radial fan blows air through a copper fin array and then leaves the pc housing via the card its second PCI slot. Just above the GPU two heatpipes are used so that the heat is spread out over the entire copper heatsink, heatpipes are also known for their excellent cooling ability's and so it isn't really a surprise to find them there.



The large and heavy heatsink is held in place with some kind of back plate which prevents 8 screws from damaging the PCB. A second central back plate protects the card from bending due to the excessive heatsink mounting pressure:



The most important reason why there is a large black is because this card has RAM chips on both sides of its PCB. The plate itself is made of aluminum and comes with pre-applied thermal pads:



On the front side we also found thermal pads used for cooling the memory chips. On the left side of our below picture you can also see extra thermal pads which are used to create better contact between the PWM modules and the heatsink itself. The position of the dual heatpipes just above the GPU core is good visible here, also notice the thermal grease at the center which is based on silver particles in order to create as less thermal resistance as possible:



A naked HD 2900 XT, GPU is positioned central with its 16 RAM chips (double sided!) around it. More to the left the ATI Theater can be found while the whole right side the PCB is filled up with a huge PWM circuit.



7-phase digital PWM leaves the card with more then 2OO Ampere to play around with, remarkable peace of electronic art:



PCIe 6-pin and PCIe 8-pin connectors are required though in real life this card will work just fine when using dual 6-pin power connectors.