Date:
Monday , October 01, 2007
Author:
Matthew Krysiak
Editor:
Brent Justice
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MSI RX2600XT Diamond

How does MSI’s new factory overclocked Radeon HD 2600 XT GPU based video card sporting a dual-slot heatsink and fan design stack up in the latest games? We also find out if there are any true gaming experience differences between ATI’s reference clock speeds and MSI’s overclock.

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System Test Setup

For our test system platform we are using a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor at 2.4 GHz, and 2 GB of XMS2 Dominator CM2X1024-9136C5D at 5-5-5-15 1T. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

All three video cards were evaluated at their default frequencies and with the latest drivers available at the time of the evaluation.

Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

In our graphs we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

P ADAA = Performance Adaptive AA – This indicates the use of Performance mode Adaptive AA on X2000 series ATI cards.

Q ADAA = Quality Adaptive AA – This indicates the use of Quality mode Adaptive AA on X2000 series ATI cards.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 8 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 8 series video cards.