This time our old friends from HiS have submitted their latest technology in the form of a Radeon HD 2600 XT with no less than 512MB memory. The new Radeon HD 2600 products for the past few weeks have finally penetrated the market a little. As you guys probably now by now, AMD has launched no less than five desktop graphics cards. In the high-end range you will see the 80nm fabrication process Radeon HD 2900 XT. AMD also launching an all new Radeon HD 2400 and HD 2600 series and these products will be based on the latest 65nm fabrication production process. And yes, all these products including the Radeon HD 2600 series are DirectX 10 compatible products. - Guru3D

HIS Radeon HD 2600 XT IceQ Turbo Graphics Review

As stated, today's product is a HIS product, and in their line-up they always offer an IceQ version usually combined with a Turbo tag. Today's product is no different. Not only does it come with 512MB memory which is quite something for a mid-range product, it also comes pre-overclocked and has that IceQ cooler slapped on top of it. Under codename RV630, ATI developed the Radeon HD 2600 and it will become available in just two models, the PRO and XT version. Compared to the R600, AMD is manufacturing RV610 and RV630 on a 65nm manufacturing process as it's on a quest for low power consumption.

If you are in the market for it, the Radeon HD 2600 series is probably what you guys will buy the most. It's DirectX 10 ready product with a stackload of features. Here's also where the CrossFire fun starts. You will see the new recently introduced CrossFire connectors, bridged just like NVIDIA's SLI connector. You insert two of these cards in a compatible mainboard, apply the two CrossFire bridges, enable it in the Catalyst driver and you are home free. The GPU core has 390 million transistors, which is a friggin lot for a mid-range product. We see a good number of shader processors, 120 stream processing units.

Clock speeds are high, very high. The clocks on this Radeon HD 2600 XT IceQ are at a nice 830MHz. The memory then, we weres really hoping to see AMD be the first to go for a 256-bit wide memory bus but unfortunately just like the competition they are sticking to 128-bit. This is where the cards will hurt from the most. Normally the memory for this GDDR3 model card would be clocked at roughly 1400MHz for the XT models that is, this HIS model however comes with a 1860MHz clock frequency. And looking at the graphics card, you will notice that the PCB color of the card is no longer red yet blue.

We have to admit, a HIS product never fails to disappoint. Now we can discuss the generic performance of the Radeon HD 2600 series over and over again, but this is what ATI has to offer at the moment. So get this, the card as shown today you can pick up for roughly $170, that's including the cooler and the 512MB GDDR3 memory, with plenty of texture memory for upcoming game titles that in my book definitely is a positive. So then, with 512MB, you get to play with high quality textures. It's in these facts where you need to look for the advantage of 512MB memory.

The Radeon HD 2600 XT IceQ Turbo is a very prominent series. For the money versus the features this is going to be a well received mid-range product. It offers heaps of features and functionality for a fair sum of money. With videocards however, there's more to consider then just gaming. So while overall performance has a hard time keeping up with the competition, everything else about the HIS Radeon HD 2600 XT IceQ Turbo model is really promising, including the price.