Tretail availability of the mainstream Radeon HD 2000 series graphics cards will almost reach the one month mark. Obviously, it is still premature to pass judgment on its success so far, though based on our anecdotal experiences, it seems to be faring quite decently despite NVIDIA's performance leadership for the segment. Our background as hardware enthusiasts may slightly skew our priorities sometimes but for the lower and mid-range segment, performance may not necessarily be the overriding factor. We shall know whether this cautious optimism regarding the Radeon HD 2000 series is accurate once actual sales figures are available. At least ATI seems to have ample supply. - Hardware Zone

GeCube Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB X-Turbo Review

GeCube is another partner that has stuck with ATI, including to the extent of releasing some unique AGP versions of ATI products that are native PCI Express. As you might expect, the company has some special editions of the Radeon HD 2000 series to offer consumers. Today, we take a look at the GeCube Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 edition and the X-Turbo II cooler on it. GeCube has gone for an impressively huge two slot cooler that feels weighty and solid in our hands. This heatpipe based cooler, dubbed the X-Turbo II by GeCube has a rather large fan but despite this, it is actually rather silent.

The version we received is not only unique for the X-Turbo II silent cooler but also for the OC Edition branding on its package. Contrary to the impression that having such a logo will naturally impart to the observer, this GeCube card is not overclocked out of the box. GeCube states that the marketing intentions behind such a label is to inform consumers that this card is suitable and geared for overclocking, though we feel that it can easily be misconstrued the wrong way. Although things may still change in the time before this product gets finalized and shipped out to retailers.

At this point in time this OC Edition does not come overclocked. However, with the X-Turbo II cooler, it could be reasonable to think that it may achieve lower temperatures and hence allow for greater overclocking. In any case, we found that the core and memory clocks on this card to be at the standard 800MHz and 2200MHz respectively. The high memory frequency is only possible with GDDR4 memory and the frame buffer size offered is 256MB. Like all Radeon HD graphics cards, the core has specialized hardware, including a Universal Video Decoder and Advanced Video processor to support decoding of HD video codecs.

Once again, we were restricted in our overclocking efforts by the ATI Overdrive utility. While we could easily overclock to the maximum allowed, there was no telling if the GeCube could be overclocked further successfully, simply because the limit set by Overdrive is rather conservative. The resultant small amount of overclocking and performance gain was hardly exciting though we wouldn't dissuade anyone to try it since it was after all rather effortless. Being in the business as long as we have, it's safe to say that we have seen all sorts of marketing gimmicks thought up by companies to attract consumers.

However, there are times when even after knowing the entire story, the actions of some remain a mystery to us. GeCube's decision to market this Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR4 card with a large golden OC Edition logo is clearly one of these occasions. It was obvious that this was a standard card and further conversation with GeCube's representative ensured that we didn't get this part wrong. Even the model name is identical to a non overclocked version. By all accounts, this card's unique feature is the X-Turbo II cooler, which we have to say, does provide slightly better cooling at the expense of an expansion slot.

As for the graphics card at the heart of this, it is actually a decent one with reference clock speeds and an above average custom cooler. Temperatures are slightly lower than the reference model but any hopes of any outstanding overclocks are mere speculation at the moment. Finally, there is the inevitable price hike associated with any special editions from any vendor and in this case, the GeCube is selling at around $169, as compared to the $149 launch price of the reference card. We reckon that the cooler and the addition of a new DirectX 10 compatible game are worth the extra cost.