For the last year or so, we were presented many native DirectX 10 graphics accelerators. AMD itself presented its mid and low-range cards relatively recently. The Radeon HD 2400 XT and Radeon HD 2600 XT are graphics cards that brought a great advancement in technology compared to the past ATI generations, but are nevertheless quite unsatisfactory in terms of performance, especially for users who play in higher resolutions and want a high framerate. If you have a need for high performance hardware, there is no other solution but to give an enormous amount of money for one of the Radeon HD 2900 XT cards as far as AMD is concerned. - InsideHW

AMD Gemini 2600 XT Dual GPU Video Board Preview

The conclusion is clear, there is no graphics card on the market that fits in what was previously known as higher mid-range, both in terms of performance and price, nor NVIDIA or AMD. As AMD was quite late with presenting its cheaper DirectX 10 accelerators, the head of the company decided to be the first ones to release a card of the aforementioned type. The graphics card we have checked came directly from the engineering room in one of AMD's factories. The first thing we noticed about this card is its size, and the very unusual blue PCB which is quite strange for any ATI products.

We definitely disliked this fact, but we learnt that only engineer samples have such large PCB's, and commercially available models are bound to have significantly smaller ones. Two 6-pin connectors are required to power the card, but this should be no problem on any newer power supplies. The single chip version of the Radeon HD 2600 XT is not a large power consumer, so there is no reason to fear, really. The Gemini 2600 XT is nothing else but a single graphics card that has two RV630 accelerators onboard. Bluntly put, this is a Radeon HD 2600 XT CrossFire system placed on a single board.

The basics are as follows, two GPU's manufactured in 65nm working at 800MHz paired with 1GB of GDDR3 memory signed by Samsung and ready for 1.2ns operation, with means a clock speed of 1600MHz effectively. What dominates this card are two massive coolers reminiscent of Zalman's VF700 series. This cooler design proved great, especially since far weaker coolers keep the RV630 cool, so we can only hope that solutions like this will be available on all models once they reach the market. Unfortunately, this engineer sample refused to boot the operating system, although we had the necessary drivers!

Still, this card has an obvious advantage, there is no need of a CrossFire certified motherboard which are generally expensive with two PCI Express expansion slots. The expected price of this card on the market is somewhere between $200 and $250, and if this turns out to be true and it probably will, this card could prove to be the ultimate best buy... Of course that would mean that ATI still have some work to do before any release.