Something About the Details, Sapphire...

Having gone through the first impressions of the Radeon HD 2600 XT accelerator, it is time to check a bit deeper and reveal the real nature of the Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 edition graphics card. We will actually take a closer look and highlight some of the vital features. We will start with the front and move slowly to the underlying components. As we already mentioned the Sapphire version is in fact a reference design, coming with standard single slot cooling solution and equipped with high performance GDDR4 memory chips. This is in fact the greatest version of the Radeon HD 2600 series currently available and should be able to deliver some decent gaming performance.

As already mentioned, the main advantage relates to the GDDR4 memory chips versus the normal GDDR3 chips on the more common Radeon HD 2600 XT version. In the end, this could give some benefits and should offer some extra performance and possible overclocking potential. The Sapphire version looks sturdy, though light and on top of all it's quite impressive. The actual PCB is almost completely hidden away behind the single slot cooling solution. Peeking out at the bottom we see the PCI Express interface connection. Just as most manufacturers have done, Sapphire did stick with the reference cooling design by from ATI which is a plain and simple single slot cooling solution. Just as other vendors, Sapphire is following the product line as set by ATI which isn't actually setting their products apart from the competition.

The GDDR4 version is fully covered by a transparent plastic cover plate which gives it a nice view on the underlying heatsink. The ventilator used by Sapphire grabs the air around it and pushes it through the heatsink and the linear metal slats. Doing so the air gets a decent circulation and takes up the heat generated by the Sapphire accelerator. The heatsink it quite large, with that we really mean long but very low in profile. This way the cooling can remain slick and doing so ATI avoids the need of a dual slot cooling solution. And excellent way of thinking as a mid-range graphics card shouldn't really get equipped with a large cooling unit just for the sake of it. And what about the looks, does that need any words? Well we don't think so, as it looks just great...

	Radeon HD 2600 PRO	Radeon HD 2600 XT
Core	600MHz	800MHz
Shader	600MHz	800MHz
Memory	1000MHz	1600MHz GDDR3	2200MHz GDDR4
Processors	120	120

Now to situate the Radeon HD 2600 XT, it is in fact the fastest version of the Radeon HD 2600 series. The Radeon HD 2600 PRO is the entry level card, which comes so far in only one version with some fast DDR2 memory chips. The Radeon HD 2600 XT however is the faster part and there are two versions available, one with GDDR3 and one with GDDR4 memory chips. And we gotten from Sapphire the later version with the ultra fast GDDR4 chips, which we currently only saw used on the Radeon X1950 XTX graphics card. All these cards are however built around the same RV630 graphics core which features a total of 120 stream processors. As these cards are DirectX 10 compliant, these mid-range parts can perform a number of new tricks which we haven't seen on the previous generation of ATI graphics cards.

And what about the rear view? Well it doesn't bring any surprises, and does look like most ATI based graphics cards. Plain and simple that's the least you can say about the back side of the video card. In fact there isn't that much to see and therefore becomes less spectacular. However we will try to uncover as much as possible by giving some impressions. All the major components are brought to the front of the card so the back side will only reveal some minor parts like electronic interconnections and resistors. On the PCB we spotted the position of the GPU itself, the RV630 chip. This is outlined by the four screws and X-shape square with in the middle quite a lot of small resistors.

And yes located at the top of the board you find the CrossFire connection. Since ATI has introduced the CrossFire technology, almost all their graphics card features this extra technology. The CrossFire connection provides the means to support multi-GPU power. So in essence you can combine the raw processing power of two Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT video accelerators. Of course this CrossFire connection has changed recently and is now an internal bridge. This is actually a great improvement over the old external crosslink for multi-GPU operation. The Radeon HD 2600 XT requires no extra power, which means that the power supplied via the PCI Express slot is enough to render all graphical gaming sceneries.