System setup and notes
| Graphics cards | GeCube Radeon RV630XT X-Turbo2 256MiB GDDR4 | Sapphire HD 2600XT Ultimate 256MiB GDDR3 | XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX 256MiB GDDR3 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU clock speed (MHz) | 796.5 | 796.5 | 620 | ||
| Shader clock speed (MHz) | 796.5 | 796.5 | 1355 | ||
| Memory clock speed (MHz) | 2196 | 1386 | 1600 | ||
| Memory bus width (bits) | 128 | 128 | 128 | ||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB, LGA775) | ||||
| Motherboard | Asus P5K Premium WiFi AP Edition (P35 + ICH9R) | eVGA NF68 (NVIDIA NF6 680i SLI) | |||
| BIOS revision | 0204 | 691N0P20 | |||
| Memory | 1GiB (2 x 512MiB) OCZ26671024ELDCGE-K PC5400 | ||||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-8 @ DDR2-667 | ||||
| Disk drive(s) | 160GiB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 (3Gb/s mode) | ||||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf Update 8.3.0.1013 | NVIDIA platform driver 9.53 | |||
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 7.7 final | ForceWare 158.22 | |||
| Operating system | Windows XP Professional - 32-bit with SP2 |
||||
Tests
| 3D Benchmarks | Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Testing notes
We're comparing the performance of the two Radeon HD 2600 XT cards with that of a proven GeForce 8600 GT XXX from XFX. The XFX currently retails for around £85, is pre-overclocked and has a broadly similar feature-set to the two HD 2600 XTs.
Like the Sapphire, it uses GDDR3 memory (rather than GDDR4) but it's a little light in its video playback, with no HDCP-compliance.
Benchmarks were conducted at 1280 x 1024 4x AA 8x AF and 1600 x 1200 no AA 8x AF. These are likely resolutions and image-quality settings for mid-range cards and we've run the cards through three popular games.
As always, we ran each benchmark three times and then calculated the arithmetic mean. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect a set that was within a margin of statistical error. We report any major attempts needed to get three reliable results, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary. Want to know more? Head for the HEXUS.community.
On we go!
