Test Rig Configuration

That's it about the card itself, from a hardware and design point of view. Leaving you with all with this impression on the Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT we are going to move to the performance you can expect from this graphics accelerator. The system used to compile and analyze the gaming performance figures is build around the high-end Intel Core 2 Duo technology, which will provide extensive central processing power supporting the RV630 visual and processing capabilities. We are using our new and high performing system based around the Intel 975X Express chipset powering our mainboard. So, let's go through the system specifications...

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz Dual Core Processor
• ASUS P5W Digital Home Deluxe (i975X) Mainboard
• G.Skill Extreme 2GB PC2-6400 Dual Channel Memory
• Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 Graphics Card
• PowerColor Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR3 Graphics Card
• Western Digital 320GB Caviar SE 8MB Cache Hard Disk
• Speeze RockeTeer 600W (SLI Ready) Power Supply
• Cooler Master Stacker 832 (RC-832) Tower Case
• Arctic Cooling MX-2 Performance Thermal Compound
• Dell UltraSharp 30" 3007WFP (Black) LCD Flat Display
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 Edition

As you can see we have used the some high performance components, and we would like to thank G.Skill and PowerColor for their generosity on supplying us with some excellent hardware. The ASUS mainboard is based around the Intel 975X chipset supporting the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR2 memory. We will be using our modest Core 2 Duo E6300 but running at 2.8GHz to support the high-end graphics cards. So both the mainboard and CPU are fine tuned to support this overclocking, to provide the maximum compatible and stable clock speeds. Throughout the benchmarking and gaming analysis we are using the new Catalyst 7.8 drivers provided by ATI recently, which is actually some more advanced drivers since the introduction of the Radeon HD 2600 series.

Additional Specifications

First we will grab some information from Everest Ultimate Edition and get some feedback on the video card sub system. Lavalys was nice enough to allow us to evaluate their software for our reviews. I really like the wealth of information this utility gives us and we thank Lavalys for their support. Everest Ultimate Edition 2007 is the cutting-edge benchmarking and diagnostics tool to maximize security, performance, and troubleshooting capabilities for home and office PC environments, PC professionals and consulting firms as well as OEM partners and configuration centers worldwide. We ran some analyzing tests using Everest and this is what we got.

Yeah, the Radeon HD 2600 XT is totally different as to what we have seen previous generation cards from ATI and that has to do with the unified shader technology. The Radeon HD 2600 XT is based upon the same technology and architecture to redefine the shader technology as the previously introduced Radeon HD 2900 series. We don't speak anymore about fixed vertex and pixel shaders but about stream processors that can be used according to what is required. So these stream processors are capable of being dynamically allocated to the vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operations. The Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 comes clocked at 800/2200MHz with a shader clock at 800MHz, which are actually the reference clock speeds. The Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 edition is powered by the RV630 core and features 120 stream processors and 4 raster operations units.

One thing we didn't mention yet is what is included in the bundle, so just to briefly mention that you get a Driver CD, Quick Installation Manual, S-Video cable, DVI to VGA converter, DVI to HDMI converter and a CrossFire bridge. So a very decent bundle with all items included except some games. It would have been nice to have some sort of reduced Black Box or Orange Box copy coming with the Radeon HD 2600 GDDR4 package, so that you can immediately get a copy of Half-Life 2: Episode One. But everything else is present even a HDMI converter which the first time to see that delivered with a graphics accelerator. Before going further, we would like to show of the Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT card being placed in our system. Let's do that and see how the Radeon HD 2600 XT edition fills up a free PCI Express expansion slot.

Yeah installed and ready to power our system. But before we go on, this card looks good in our system, what am I saying it looks awesome! We can already notice that the cooling does not interfere with any surrounding motherboard components. Although the Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT is longer single slot design it fits perfectly in our case. So you are right, the Sapphire card takes up only one expansion slot, but is taking up a bit more space due to its length compared to the standard GDDR3 version. That's it folks, time to hit up some synthetic benchmarks. We used the Catalyst 7.8 drivers from ATI and will be using our favorite Futuremark benchmark utilities and stack up some popular game titles. Let's hit the road...