The Card

Sapphire are actually the first company we have seen stick with the OEM flame design and have only opted to place a sticker on the fan. The flame design on the cooler is actually really cool and it looks a bit tacky when a partner has placed a sticker on top while still having the flames slightly visible.

The front of the card is mostly taken up by the heatsink, leaving not much room for anything else. We can see the heatsink / heatpipe design thanks to the see-through housing which looks pretty funky.

Doing a quick spin around the card we have our two power connectors, one is our standard 6-pin PCI-Express connector and the other is a newer 8-pin connector. Since Sapphire hasn't chosen to include any 6-pin to 8-pin connectors you will have to use a standard 6-pin connector in it if your power supply doesn't have an 8-pin connector. The good news is that the only feature you lose is the auto-overclocking feature in the drivers, you can continue to overclock manually when using the card by itself.

Sitting across the top of the card we also have our crossfire connectors which we will be finally making use of. Of course two cables need to be connected to make use of Crossfire and that's exactly what we intend to do.

Since the main focus of the article today is the performance of Crossfire vs 8800 Ultra, we will quickly give our quick final thoughts on what the Sapphire HD 2900 XT offered.

While the card managed to overclock it didn't go quite as hard as our MSI offering, though it did manage to do better than the ASUS. It seems to be hit and miss at the moment with these cards and it's completely random as to how well yours will overclock.

The package on a whole is fantastic with the only thing missing being some power connectors, these being molex to 6-pin or 6-pin to 8-pin. With that said the 8-pin isn't really needed and most people should find themselves with a power supply that comes with at least two PCI-Express power connectors these days.

With stock clocks the card performs exactly like you would expect, and priced at roughly only 10% more than the cheapest offerings it's a pretty nice card.

With the formalities out the way let's roll out (Yes, I saw Transformers "Auto-bots Roll Out!")…rolling out!