ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Basic Review

My reviews are going years backwards...Who cares? This card is a good bargain for budget gamers...

Radeon HD 2600 XT is the oldmid-range video card from AMD/ATI, supporting Shader 4.0 unified architecture (i.e., DirectX 10) and competing directly with GeForce 8600 GT from NVIDIA, both costing around USD 150.
The second problem is that AMD there are two basic versions of Radeon HD 2600 XT, one using GDDR4 memories running at 2.2 GHz (1.1 GHz DDR) and another using GDDR3 memories running at 1.6 GHz (800 MHz DDR). And for Radeon HD 2400 they allow the manufacturer to set any clock rate they want. The problem is that the reference models we got for reviewing were running at the top clock speeds and other Radeon HD 2600 and HD 2400 boards you will find at the market may be running at lower clock rates and thus achieving a lower performance.
With both GeForce 8600 GT and Radeon HD 2600 XT with GDDR4 memory having a suggested price of USD 150, they are clearly targeted to users that are looking for the best cost/benefit ratio possible, i.e., to users that want to play games at a good performance but don’t want to buy an expensive high-end model.

So, which one is the best for Average Joe?



Well, we are pretty confident that GeForce 8600 GT still is the best video card for the average user that is willing to spend up to USD 150 on a decent video card. It is faster than Radeon HD 2600 XT in almost all situations, you can buy it right away and, best of all, even though its suggested price is of USD 150 you can easily find GeForce 8600 GT models costing less. Since Radeon HD 2600 XT is not available at this writing, it may reach the market initially costing more than GeForce 8600 GT.

It is also very important to keep in mind that another Radeon HD 2600 XT model will be available using GDDR3 memories running at a lower clock rate and at a lower price: it will have a suggested price of USD 130. So if you find a cheap Radeon HD 2600 XT being sold, beware, this particular model isn’t a direct competitor to GeForce 8600 GT. And cheap here will mean far slower.




For those interested, here is a summary of our bechmarking. GeForce 8600 GT was between 9% and 50% faster than Radeon HD 2600 XT on 3DMark03, between 8% and 20% faster on Quake 4 and between 17% and 98% faster on Far Cry. On F.E.A.R. Radeon HD 2600 XT was between 42% and 47% faster when no image quality settings were enable, but when we increase image quality GeForce 8600 GT was between 37% and 50% faster. And on Battlefield 2142 Radeon HD 2600 XT was faster than GeForce 8600 GT only at 1024x768 with no image quality settings enabled (6% faster), on other scenarios GeForce 8600 GT was between 4% and 28% faster.

The only program where Radeon HD 2600 XT was faster was on 3DMark06, with a performance advantage between 5% and 7%. Which isn’t really a significant advantage when we consider all other results.

Oh yes. Radeon HD 2600 XT supports HDMI with digital audio routed directly to the HDMI connector. That is definitely an advantage over GeForce 8600 GT if you are into high-def video.