Conclusions

Things to say could be a lot, we can't only make a brief valuation of the product because there are a lot of aspects to consider.
Let's start with the price: the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT will be commercialized in Italy with a price around 400€, in line with others producers. For that price the direct concurrent is the Nvidia 8800GTS 640MB. Both are DirectX10-compatible, changes the quantity of ram (superior on Nvidia), but the bandwidth is superior on the 2900. The AMD proposal is more oriented to new multimedia platforms, like the HD format with the hardware compatibility to Blue Ray and HD DVD Readers. There's only one problem: when will really be available HD DVD and Blue Ray contents and readers?
Even if we compare it with the 8800GTS 640, with the drivers we have (8.37.4.2), in all game tests except one, the performances have ever been inferior to the one of the Nvidia vga. The first tests has been made with older divers that caused even lower scores, so there is a lot of work to do on their optimization to obtain best performances.
Even talking about drivers, a better attention distributing the drivers to the headers would had take to better performances. But overall, releasing a new driver version 36 hours before the public presentation it's not very useful to who has to make in-depth tests.
Another seen problem, after a few minutes of work at default, the air coming out reached the temperature of 70°C, the cooler is of good quality, but the heat producing is really excessive.

Anyway, the Radeon HD 2900XT shown its potentialities in 3dmark, especially in 2005, where thanks to the latest drivers, has totally overcome his rival.

Vista or XP? We agree that the directX10 are a great step forward for the image quality, but we noticed some problem during the test on Vista, especially some slowing down during some benchmarks.
In 48 hours we made a lot of tests in every condition: air, liquid and nitrogen, we will continue tests because we are sure that the product can express a lot more, we are only waiting for some mature drivers.

We conclude with a reflection: 4-6 months of retard are a lot, who was waiting for a graphic card comparable with the 8800 GTX and Ultra, now knows that has to wait more. Ok, we're talking of different price bands, but now, retard for retard, it was probably better to wait some more and have a top product, in line with the concurrent?

Thanks to Jetway and MEC electronics B.V. to put at our disposal the sample of this test.