Shortly after releasing their long awaited Radeon HD 2900 XT, ATI announced a new generation of mid-range and low-end graphics accelerators, the Radeon HD 2600 and Radeon HD 2400 series. The Radeon HD 2600 series follow up the Radeon X1600 series and are ATI's next best mid-range product while the Radeon HD 2400 series are meant for the entry level gamers among us. The Radeon HD 2400 series are ATI's latest entry level graphics accelerators meant for people who can live with less detailed in-game and prefer the price as low as possible. And with PowerColor jumping on the ATI wagon, we will find out what this products is all about. - Madshrimps

PowerColor Radeon HD 2400 XT PCI Express Review

The card itself is very small compared to the high-end boys we've been checked out the past months, though nothing special compared to other entry level stuff. The amount of components found on this card is kept very low, while this is certainly cost reducing we hope that our card remains stable at any given moment. For their Radeon HD 2400 XT, PowerColor chose for active cooling by combining a small black heatsink with a low quality 40mm fan. This made this card a single slot solution which shouldn't cause problems during installation. At the back of the card we didn't find any additional power connectors.

On each side of the PCB two memory chips have been placed, and those chips don't come with any kind of heatsink or fan cooling solution. The black heatsink found on the front of the card doesn't provide additional cooling for the front memory chips, these are DDR2 and don’t really need cooling when used at lower clock speeds. As stated on ATI's site these cards also come with support for CrossFire graphics, but no additional CrossFire connectors have been added and so the cards has to fall back to the systems PCI Express bus. Though, with cards like these it's very questionable why we would ever need CrossFire.

The Radeon HD 2400 series overclocks like any other classic graphics card, no separate clocked GPU core domains this time like NVIDIA did with their G80, but it does seem to have a multiplier problem as the core and memory clock only jumps up with about 7MHz at a time. We used AMD's own software tool which reads the PowerColor Radeon HD 2400 XT clocked at 695/693MHz. The memory on the other hand overclocked very well, 100MHz extra shouldn't be that hard to accomplish In the end we managed to overclock our card 735/837MHz. The core frequency will probable have the most impact.

After the release of the high-end Radeon HD 2900 XT, ATI announced new product updates coming for the entry-level and mainstream gamers. Gamers on a not so tight budget should look into one of their Radeon HD 2600 series graphics cards while the low-end market is occupied by the Radeon HD 2400 series. PowerColor supplied us with their Radeon HD 2400 XT, the fastest card in ATI's Radeon HD 2400 gamma.