The ATI Radeon HD2900 XT has been unleashed on the world at last flames and all. About six months behind the Nvidia competition, the GeForce 8800 GTS, AMD have played catch up releasing their first DirectX 10 card onto the market. It retails at US$399, more than the GTS but how does it stack up performance wise. Well here’s a sample of reviews in no particular order.

• TweakTown
• Tech Report
• [H]Enthusiast
• Hot Hardware

The general consensus seems to be that AMD have missed the boat with this card and the performance difference between this and the GTS does not justify the slightly higher price tag. There are quite a few negative comments about the power usage and noise too. So it doesn’t look as if people will be rushing out to grab this little puppy to show off their new flame red video card.

The showcase took place at CES 2007, today. Intel revealed a new PC concept that was created to counteract AMD’s 4×4 gamer platform. The new system is called “V8″ and a demonstration took place with a pair of Kentsfield Xeon’s (quad-core). That’s a total of 8 physical cores.

The system is running at 2.4GHz and uses 1066MHz system bus and FB-DIMM memory. The graphics card is supported by a single NVIDIA 8800GTX. According to Intel officials the “V8″ platform managed to score 6089 points in 3DMark 2006.

Unlike AMD’s Quad FX platform, Intel’s “V8″ system will require FB-DIMMs while Quad FX will work with regular unbuffered memory. The AMD Quad FX platform can also support multiple GeForce video cards in SLI configuration, while the “V8″ is currently limited to a single graphics card.

However, the competition spirit is still strong. AMD is not far away from releasing something that won’t be far away from a “8×8″ system based on quad-core Opteron processors. So with Intel and AMD making their moves, it’s Apple’s turn to hit the spotlights. They already launched their dual-xeon Mac Pro platform in the middle of last year, but it’s time to keep up with the technology.

If something else happens, we’ll keep you posted.