Date:
Monday , July 16, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is here for us to put it through its DX10 paces. Who will take home the crown in the first full DirectX 10 game under Windows Vista? New games including Oblivion: Shivering Isles, WoW: Burning Crusade, Lord of the Rings Online, and Lost Planet.

Introduction

The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT was officially announced on May 14th as one of the midrange models within the Radeon HD 2000 family. The Radeon HD 2600 XT is at the high-end of the “midrange” cards, known as the Radeon HD 2600 series. The “XT” model sits at the top with the Radeon HD 2600 Pro right below that in the hierarchy. Right above the Radeon HD 2600 XT is the Radeon HD 2900 XT. That leaves quite a big gap actually since the Radeon HD 2600 XT has an MSRP of $149 and the Radeon HD 2900 XT is at $399. There is a lot of room there for ATI to introduce new video cards based on the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series architecture in the future.

One of the most exciting features about the Radeon HD 2600 XT is the fact that it is based on a new 65nm manufacturing process instead of the Radeon HD 2900 XT’s 80nm HS process. This not only improves yields for ATI but also allows the Radeon HD 2600 XT to theoretically draw less power and produce less heat and provide a higher performance per watt ratio. We will test power and heat further in this evaluation.

There are actually two different versions of the Radeon HD 2600 XT you need to be aware of. The fastest model uses GDDR4 memory modules and will be priced at an MSRP of $149. There will also be a GDDR3 version that may be clocked lower and therefore priced slightly lower. The model we are evaluating today is the top dog GDDR4 version. The Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 consists of 390 million transistors containing 120 streaming processors, 8 texture units and 4 ROPs with a core speed of 800 MHz. There is 256 MB of GDDR4 on board running at 1100 MHz (2.2 GHz DDR) on a 128-bit memory bus providing 35.2 GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

The architecture of the Radeon HD 2600 XT matches that of the Radeon HD 2900 XT in features and capabilities. It has full DirectX 10 Shader Model 4.0 support, uses a Unified Architecture based on a Superscaler design, contains a hardware Tesselator and supports HDMI and a hardware Unified Video Decoder Engine (UVD). We will look at HD-DVD performance in Windows Vista later in this evaluation.

The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

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As you can see ATI has adorned the Radeon HD 2600 XT with their new silver flamed reference design logo. One of the first things you will notice is that there is no external power connector needed for this video card. It does not require auxiliary power; the PCI-Express slot is enough to feed it what it needs.

The design of airflow is such that it takes in air where the FAN is and exhausts it toward the back of your computer. Since it is a single-slot video card this heat, like all single-slot video cards, is dumped into your PC, so cooling is still important in your case even with this lower powered video card.

Another attribute you will notice is the video cards length. This is the longest video card we have ever seen in the $149 price range. Its length matches that of the Radeon X1950 Pro at 9 inches long. In fact, it is almost as long as the Radeon HD 2900 XT which measures only half an inch longer at 9.5 inches. For comparison the XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition being used in this review as its competition is 6.875 inches long. Those with HTPC cases will want to make sure this video card will fit into their computer first before purchasing it.

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The Radeon HD 2600 XT fully supports native CrossFire. You can take two of these video cards and CrossFire them for added performance. The Radeon HD 2600 XT also supports dual-link DVI ports and full HDMI and HDCP capabilities.

For being a 65nm GPU we are a bit surprised how long the video card is and how large and heavy the heatsink is. It seems to feel only slightly lighter than an X1950 Pro. The heatsink seems too made of copper fins sitting on top of an aluminum base, there is a lot more metal on this video card than we had originally assumed would be necessary for this GPU.

The Comparison

The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT carries an MSRP of $149, and currently can be found on Newegg at $5 below this very price in the form of a Sapphire HD 2600 XT. We make our comparisons by price, and the competitively priced video card from NVIDIA is the GeForce 8600 GT. Though, this can get a bit tricky because there are factory overclocked GT’s, as well as standard clocked GT’s and many stores are offering rebates making prices cheap. Not only that, but with rebates on the faster GeForce 8600 GTS prices are coming down closer to the Radeon HD 2600 XT’s price.

We found that the closest competition in price was in fact a factory overclocked GeForce 8600 GT. We used an XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition which at Newegg is exactly the same price as the Radeon HD 2600 XT at $149. However, the XFX video card does have a mail-in rebate available at Newegg which would bring the price down to $129, which is $20 cheaper than the Radeon HD 2600 XT.

We then looked at the next level up, which is the GeForce 8600 GTS and found that prices were higher without rebates than the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT. The cheapest price without rebate was $164 dollars. That is still close to the HD 2600 XT, but not as exact as the price of the XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition at $149. Interestingly, with the mail-in rebate involved, an EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS can be had for $149, but that’s after the mail-in rebate.

Upon evaluating the performance of the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT in comparison to the XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition we saw no need to include the GeForce 8600 GTS at all since the results are very clear as you will see.