PowerColor HD 2600 XT

INTRODUCTION

It's been quite hectic lately with these Shader Model 4.0 cards being out. Not only NVIDIA came up as a winner here in terms of availability, the performance of G80 cards was more than standard when compared against R600 boards. The end of June marked AMD's launch of ATI Radeon HD 2600 and 2400 series which were pretty late anyway. Take a note though that mainstream and entry level cards are always overdue and flagship high-end products come first to the game.

For todays reading pleasure we have Powercolor HD 2600 XT with 256 MB of onboard 128-bit GDDR3 memory. There is GDDR4 model, but it wasn't available at that time. It may not be a bleeding edge performer, nonetheless it looks like an interesting DirectX® 10 product with HD-ready output.

Because the first card I had received was defective, it took a while before this review could see the daylight. Believe me though, it had nothing to do with AMD accidentally shipping bad HD 2600 / 2400 cards into the market. Some say that was a rumor, but sources close to Bjorn3D claim there was a batch of broken Radeons in one of the warehouses.

KEY FEATURES

• Hardware processed 1080p video playback of Blu-ray™ and HD DVDs
• Plug-n-play CrossFire™ upgradeability
• HDMI with 5.1 surround sound audio
• DirectX® 10 support

Should you require more detailed information on about HD 2000 products, please revisit our article: HD 2000 - The First GPU's Under the AMD Name