ATI released their Radeon HD 2900 XT to an awaiting enthusiast audience who were, a little disappointed. Apart from the price and awesome bundle the card offered little new to the market. Now the mid-range cards are upon us and once again ATI trail behind NVIDIA on release schedule. Having said that, ASUS have given us a couple of nice looking cards with some 3rd party coolers so it will be interesting to see how these go down. The cards have to go up against the GeForce 8600 series, but are these really up to speed to make NVIDIA run for its money? If we look back at the Radeon HD 2900 XT, we aren't having a positive view on the performance, but this is the mid-range segment. - Overclock3D

ASUS Extreme AH2600 PRO and XT Graphics Review/

In the spirit of making the lower chips have higher numbers than the top end, ATI have named their mid-range RV630. With a scaled down version of the R600 architecture and boasting a nice 194 GFlops of power, the Radeon HD 2600 series looks pretty sweet on paper. The RV630 chip keeps the ring bus memory architecture from R600 as well, albeit scaled down to a 128-bit interface. Some of the bits on paper looks pretty good but if you look a little more closely there are a few areas where the Radeon HD 2600 falls behind a little, certainly compared against the G84 chip from NVIDIA.

ASUS have done a nice job packaging up their Radeon HD 2600 XT and as well for the PRO version, the box is in the usual subtle ASUS style, but with an added CGI rendered young lady. Advertised well is the fact that a non-standard cooler has been used on the card 10°C Cooler apparently. The card itself is a nice looking bit of kit. Colored in red, one of my favourite PCB colours, initial impressions are good. The card is pretty small in height and length but it is the cooler that dominates. The cooler is a Zalman-esque GPU cooler with a fairly large fan in the middle, which should operate in a quiet mode.

ATI have again failed to deliver a card that outperforms NVIDIA in the class that it is set for. Producing a top-end card that doesn't quite cut it is one thing, but when your mid-range doesn't stand up to the competition you've done something wrong. When it all comes down to it mid-range is where the sales are and ATI have hurt themselves with this one. ASUS have done some redeeming with the bundle and cooler, but not enough in our opinion to warrant you buying the cards. With the price of the PRO around $110 and a seeming lack of availability on the Extreme AH2600 XT, ATI have entered the market at a low price.