14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices launched sometime ago, without much fanfare, the Radeon 2900 Pro graphics processing unit that is intended is an intermediate level offering for those users that are not willing to invest into the more costly Radeon 2900 XT based video cards.
The 2900 Pro is mostly aimed at users that do not take gaming too seriously and like to have at the same time a last generation graphics card that is DirectX 10.0 compatible and can play high definition videos while being able to interact with the most popular display standards in use.
According to the news site fudilla, the new graphics chips that proudly sport the Radeon HD 2900 Pro designation, will only be available for a short time and only in limited quantities, as those chips are in fact downgraded versions of the top of the line Radeon HD 2900 Xts that came off the assembly lines with some minor defects.
As it is just about impossible to know exactly the number of perfectly good 2900 XT graphics processing units that are obtained from a single wafer and the number of defective but still usable ones, one cannot say with any degree of certainty if the Pro chips will be available in quantity or not. Rumor has it that some graphics cards manufacturing companies will get as many as 5,000 of those chips, so some will have to make it with much less.
As most of these chips are offering a pretty high level of performance at an affordable price, graphics cards based on them will most likely sell very quickly. The fact that the Radeon HD 2900 Pro chips are practically identical with the 2900 XT ones, and clocked only slightly lower, may enable some lucky users to overclock their cards and reach the same level of performance as in the case of the XT version at a lower cost.