AMD Radeon HD 2900XT Review

the Radeon specs look good, and the performance, looks pretty good as well, but the one thing that always concerns me is heat, and this card sucks power as well:
"This sucker's electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 jigawatts of electricity I need" - Doctor Emmett Brown

OK, it isn't that bad, but the quoted power draw is 215W at full load which is the highest power draw from any consumer 3D graphics card. For a single Radeon HD 2900 XT ATI recommends a 550W power supply. For CrossFire a 750W power supply is recommended. Power leakage is a reported problem with this GPU. Different Radeon HD 2900 XT video cards, depending on binning, will have different wattages. So if you purchase two video cards, they could very much be pulling greater or lesser wattages. Ambient temperature fluctuations will also cause differing power utilization, as the temperature increases power draw increases fast.
Click to expand...

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTM0MSwsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

None of the reviews of the GeForce cards, 8600 or 8800, mention heat or power consumption to this degree.
The different wattages on two cards, and ambient temp fluctuations, dont sound too good to have to deal with either.
 
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