The cooler of ASUS AMD ATI Radeon HD 2900XT is brand new. It's made entirely from copper and has two sturdy heatpipes for spreading the heat efficiently to all surfaces. The entire cooling profile is housed inside a plastic cover that concentrates the air flow through the cooler and releases the hot air outside of the case. The radial fan is the same kind used by NVIDIA and the 8800 series. Unlike the cooler of the 8800 series the cooler profile of the GPU and the memories are not the same, but separate. Completely understandable as the card has BGA chips on both sides of the circuit board.

The power supply of the card is cooled by the same heatspreader that cools the memories. A big, red piece of aluminum. The memory chips on the back are cooled by a lighter piece of aluminum also painted red.

The mounting holes are identical to the previous generation, which makes it a lot easier to cool the card with third-party coolers, such as water blocks, phase change cooling or container for liquid nitrogen and dry ice.

There's a small problem with third-party coolers though, the edge around the core is slightly higher than the core itself. We tried mounting water blocks, cascade and liquid nitrogen containers and the contact is satisfactory. It's not optimal so we recommend you to use blocks specifically designed for R600, which should appear soon, or make your own coldplate to fill the void. One cheap and convenient solution could be to locate an old CPU cooler using thin aluminum or copper fins. You can see what we mean on the picture below.

Tools & material		Result

The one thing that has probably caused the most discussion with the HD 2900XT is the 8-pin PCI-E connector for additional power. The only purpose of this connector is to deliver more stable voltages and, of course, more power when overclocking. You can do without and the fact is, that our tests were done with two 6-pin connectors. You don't have to buy a power supply with an 8-pin connector to overclock HD 2900XT.