AMD announced their Radeon HD 2400 series some time ago together with the Radeon HD 2900 and 2600 products. Now the first cards are available and the benchmarking NDA has expired. The card is based on the new RV610 GPU which is fully DirectX 10 compatible and has additional features like an integrated tesselator and a UVD HD video decoding engine. The Radeon HD 2400 series are designed entry market graphics cards to up against the GeForce 8500 series from the NVIDIA rival. Of course both cards are for buuyers on a small budget though have quite some features to talk about. And both cards are low priced Vista compatible cards, that will bring DirectX 10 to live. - techPowerUp!

ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT 256MB Graphics Card Review

We have not received a final packaging with our sample card. Our package only had the card and a driver CD. The design of our Radeon HD 2400 XT sample board looks a bit weird. We assume the PCB design will be changed slightly. When looking closely at the upper part we can see that there are almost no components except for the CrossFire connector and the debug test port. Since the final cards will not use a CrossFire adapter, I assume this design was mainly used for testing and developing the cards. The back of the card is completely standard, it has two of the four memory chips on it.

The cooler is a really simple construction. This shows how little heat the RV610 GPU produces. As a matter of fact several manufacturers are already working on completely passive cooling solutions for the Radeon HD 2400 series. Even though our sample card has a CrossFire connector, the retail cards will come without one. It is not needed anyway because the data can be transferred via the PCI Express bus without problems. This means that you can just put two Radeon HD 2400 XT cards into your PC, select the enable CrossFire function and it works without any additional cables or connectors.

ATI's new RV6xx GPU's use a new dynamic clock mechanism that dynamically selects the clock speed based on GPU load. Unlike previous cards this is done completely in hardware by the GPU without any intervention required by the driver. Our Radeon HD 2400 XT has three clock states, low at 110/252MHz, medium at 400/300MHz and high at 700/800MHz. The fan speeds are adjusted by temperature. This means that the card is quiet in 2D mode and the fan speed gets ramped up when the card gets hotter and requires additional cooling. The final overclocks of our card are 756MHz core and 837MHz memory.

With a price of only $79 for the XT version and even less for the PRO version, the Radeon HD 2400 XT is sitting in a niche that is mainly reserved for office PC's. However, it does include advanced features like DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0 which are probably not going to be used a lot in this performance class. On the other hand if you are in the market for a new card the price difference betweena Radeon X1300 and Radeon HD 2400 XT is so small that you can just get the Radeon HD 2400 XT for the additional features at almost no extra cost. So just go for the later one and you can enjoy some DirectX 10 visuals.

Unfortunately for AMD, NVIDIA's GeForce 8 products offer more performance for just a little bit of extra money. Users of media PC systems will love this card because it comes with the UVD HD video accleration feature that greatly reduces CPU load when decoding HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies. Being able to have HDMI, HDCP and audio all over one cable makes the card even more useful for HTPC's. The temperature controlled fan is a welcome feature to keep the annoying fan noise down.