While enthusiasts continue to wait for AMD/ATI's entrance into the high-end corner of the DirectX 10 battlefield, mainstream and casual gamers loyal to the red and green can jump right into the fray with the Radeon HD 2x00 series video cards. Today we look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 2400 XT, a budget card that, on paper, appears to be better suited for slicing through home theater PC duties than gaming skirmishes. So the DirectX 10 revolution still has yet to begin. And still, that hasn't stopped the gaming community from preparing themselves for tomorrow's games with today's purchases as DirectX 10 video cards continue to flood the market. - HardwareLogic

Sapphire Radeon HD 2400 XT Graphics Card Review

However up until recently, choices were limited as AMD/ATI remained curiously absent from this outpouring of next generation hardware, allowing NVIDIA to reign supreme. That's still the case in the high-end arena, but not so for the mainstream and budget consumer, the target audiences for ATI's new Radeon HD 2400, HD 2600 and HD 2900 series video cards. We don't expect much out of budget oriented bundles, so we weren't surprised to not see a game or other fluff throw in as value fodder, but we did find the lack of a driver disc to be a curious omission. But, the retail package will contain a driver disc.

As with most sectors in the PC industry, we've become accustomed to the leap frog effect between ATI and NVIDIA, as the two race toward the performance crown, only to lose it to the other each subsequent round. This time around, however, ATI seems to have lost their legs, and rather than jump to the front of the class where the hardcore gamers sit, they're targeting more budget oriented consumers. On the lower end of the performance spectrum, we have today's Radeon HD 2400 XT. Built around ATI's 65nm RV610 core, packed with 256MB of memory along with clock speeds set at 700MHz core and 1400MHz memory.

We are not too keen on overclocking video cards with passive cooling solutions, but because the temperatures were so low, we decided to whisk caution to the wind and see how far we could push the GPU. We also took interest in pushing the memory, as they are specified to run faster than they came shipped. And because the heatsink also covers the chips, we felt comfortable increasing their clock speed. We weren't able to achieve mind blowing results, but did manage to go from the stock 700/1400MHz to 800MHz/1500MHz, representing a 100MHz overclock on both the memory and core.

For a card not geared towards video games, gaming performance was about on par with what we would expect. A quite limited 64-bit memory interface is just too narrow to handle even a mid-range experience, but will be just fine for the casual gamer. But gamers aren't the target crowd here, and it's the home theater PC enthusiasts that will benefit the most from the Radeon HD 2400 XT. That doesn't mean we can ignore gaming performance, but if we were evaluating strictly on the merits of a home theater setup, we would likely add some good points about this graphics card.

For a budget price tag, you get big cinema performance, thanks in large part to ATI's Avivo HD technology. Playing High Definition content was smooth and vibrant, and the Universal Video Decoder ensures that the processor never gets bogged down, offloading HD processing duties to the GPU instead. Combined with a completely silent and competent cooling solution along with a rock bottom price tag, home theater PC enthusiasts will be giving the Sapphire Radeon HD 2400 XT two thumbs up. Gamers, on the other hand, need not apply. But then again, gamers shouldn't be looking in the sub $100 pricing tier anyway.