It's common practice that, right after presenting a new product, partners start to aggressively promote the already hyped products. As expected, after the premiere and NDA expiration of the mainstream segment AMD graphics cards, manufacturers began to offer their hopefuls on the market. Quite some companies are intersted though the full production doesn't seem to run as smooth and fast as it should be, giving small amount of available samples. The first such sample to reach us came from PowerColor. The model at hand was a Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. Visually, the card is quite different compared to the GDDR4 memory version. - InsideHW

PowerColor Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB Card Review

The box in which the card arrived was completely white, with no print whatsoever, which clearly states that this is a test sample. All we could find inside were the card and the newest beta drivers. The PCB of the graphics card turned out to be significantly smaller than the one with the GDDR4 memory chips onboard. This PowerColor Radeon HD 2600 XT also has a couple of CrossFire tabs on the upper side, so you can easily pair a couple of these cards up. The production is top quality, spirals are armoured, and the card is dominated by the large active cooler which irresistibly reminds us of Zalman models.

The card's fan is completely inaudible even at maximum speed, but occupies the neighbouring slot, which might be a drawback for some. The GPU used herein is a RV630 core which possesses 120 stream processors, grouped in five units. What spoils the final impression with AMD's mainstream cards is the small number of texture mapping units. Their number is only four, and we consider it a major bottleneck. This can be surpassed to a certain extent by optimising the drivers, so we can probably expect a jumpy performance rise with new driver versions and any upcoming optimizations from ATI.

What's more, this card performed fantastically compared to its elder brother. If the information we have is correct, that this card will be in the $125 price range, it would certainly be a pleasant surprise. The memory manufacturer is Hynix, and the chips have a response time of 1.4ns and are passively cooled. We are quite confident that the cooler does most of the work, as the air which flows through the fins carries away all of the heat. When its price is taken into consideration, this product is of excellent performance. The difference between this and the GDDR4 memory model are not as huge as the clock difference.

When the very small PCB is considered, together with small power consumption, we have to admit that this is a very well measured, accessible and high quality product. All we can say is that we are sorry not to have had two of these, so that we can try them in CrossFire, because we strongly believe that it would be a fantastic solution within the $250 price range.