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AMD and its partners are pitching a number of Radeon HD 2400/2600 SKUs at between £45 and £80. An appreciation of the underlying architecture informs us that the Radeon HD 2600 family will always be substantially faster in gaming than the cheaper 2400 series.
Sapphire has decided to take the Radeon HD 2600 PRO, raise the core speed to 700MHz, overclock the 256MiB of onboard memory by 40 per cent when compared to default and launch a card whose performance sits somewhere above the garden-variety PRO, obviously, but lower than a reference-clocked XT.
Factoring the £65 street price into account - just over £10 cheaper than the XT and the same money as most other AIC's PROs - 3D performance is relatively good in our low-end suite, easily outmuscling the Radeon HD 2400 XT and GeForce 8500 GT which, we note, are around £15 cheaper. 3D problems tend to arise when image quality is dialled up via the use of antialising and anisotropic filtering, as per our initial look.
More good is to be found with respect to HDCP-protected high-def video-decode performance. UVD-assisted playback sees a midrange CPU's utilisation average under 20 per cent for both H.264- and VC-1-encoded titles, freeing it up for other tasks.
Is it worth it, then? The answer is a cautious yes. Sapphire's Radeon HD 2600 PRO's greater clockspeeds makes it more attractive than others' but partner pricing is such that a faster XT variant only costs around around 20 per cent more.
Got exactly £65 to spend on a feature-rich graphics card? This is the best bet for now. Just be sure you're purchasing this particular SKU and not a default-clocked Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 PRO.
HEXUS Awards
Pre-overclocked core and memory speeds, an attractive street price and a full feature-set combine well for the Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 PRO to earn a HEXUS Media commendation.
Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256MiB
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At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any of Sapphire's representatives choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.HEXUS related reading
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