Radeon HD 2400 XT appearance and thoughts
The Radeon HD 2400 XT, being a lower-power part, is all about saving costs whichever way AMD can.
The underlying GPU doesn't become particularly warm and we expect to see a raft of passively-cooled models hit the shelves within a month of this review.
Also expect to see half-height cards geared towards the HTPC market.
The thermostatically-controlled fan switches off completely in 2D mode, where the GPU and memory speeds are dropped to just 109/504MHz. The fan runs at full speed when subject to 3D load and, frankly, is a little noisy.
The CrossFire finger(s) are located at the very top and a couple of Radeon HD 2400 XTs will provide change from £100.
The card is outfitted with 256MiB of 1800MHz-rated GDDR3 memory, however it's only running at 1600MHz as part of the ATI reference spec.
Even so, that's 12.8GB/s of juicy bandwidth available via the 64-bit interface.
[advert]The DVI port can run HDCP-protected content through its dual-link interface. Importantly, the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) is present even on this low-priced model and should take the burden from the CPU of decoding high-resolution MPEG2, VC-1 and H.264 content. That's as much a selling point as purported 3D performance, we suppose.
No surprises here, either. If you've got around £50 to spend your DX10 choices will be either this model or NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT/GeForce 8400 GS. We'll tell you which is better, so keep on readin'.
