Sapphire Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB Preview

There is no R600 Linux driver yet, but as we have shared before it is coming later this year. When the Linux support does arrive, we will be delivering same-day Linux benchmarks with a plethora of different graphics cards as well as seeing if the new AMD Linux driver can finally outperform NVIDIA's binary driver and hardware, which for years has been faster under Linux. Among the many graphics cards that we will be using to deliver these initial benchmarks is the Sapphire Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB. In this preview while being stuck with the old driver, we have a few words to say on Sapphire's fastest 512MB GPU aside from what we had shared in our launch-day Radeon HD 2900XT coverage.

We have tested out Sapphire Technology graphics cards in the past at Phoronix, but for those of you out of the loop, Sapphire is AMD's largest worldwide partner for distributing ATI graphics cards with production capabilities topping out at over 1.8 million units per month. Aside from producing both AGP and PCI Express graphics cards, Sapphire recently began producing Intel and AMD motherboards as well as a small number of multimedia products. The Sapphire HD 2900XT had arrived in retail packaging with a cutout on the front of the box to show the actual graphics card. On all sides of the box was quite a bit of information that displayed the benefits of the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT as well as the Sapphire extras.