After falling behind the power curve established by NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series video cards, AMD and ATI seem to have caught up to their industry rivals with the introduction of their Radeon HD 2000 series GPU's. While most gamers and power users will upgrade their systems to the Radeon HD 2900 or Radeon HD 2600 series cards, others on a tight budget might still want some of these high-end cards' capabilities without having to pay the hefty price tag. And to accommodate those mid-range users, PowerColor started manufacturing the Radeon HD 2400 series video cards. These come at $59 and should interest those looking for a mid-range gaming card with multimedia. - Pro-Clockers

PowerColor Radeon HD 2400 PRO Video Card Review

The packaging for the Radeon HD 2400 PRO is pretty standard, and sports PowerColor and ATI's respective logos and a digital anime warrior printed on the cover of the box. We've never really understood why video card makers liked to put these characters on their retail boxes, but we guess it's supposed to help entice consumers to look at their products. PowerColor didn't bundle much with the Radeon HD 2400 PRO, except some cables and drivers. The Radeon HD 2400 PRO is encased in a simple anti-static, bubble wrap bag. The enclosure is simple, yet effective in keeping the card static free.

The card itself is much smaller than most modern video cards these days. These video cards are perfect for multimedia PC's because of their small stature and low heat dissipation. One thing our readers will notice is that the IC's are not covered by any heatsinks, but they don't need to worry because the heat created by these specific IC's are very minimal. The back of the Radeon HD 2400 PRO features two more 64MB memory chips and has all the product serials and other specific information about the card. There's not much else to this card as for as the back panel goes.

The final portion of our view on the Radeon HD 2400 PRO is linked entirely with the overclocking ability. We've heard of many people being able to overclock this GPU, so we were eager to see how high we could push it. After several hours of tweaking the GPU clock and memory clock with ATITool, we were able to push the GPU core to 637MHz and the memory to 944MHz effective. Unfortunately, we performed the same benchmarks and didn't notice a large difference in frame rates. But, the increase does prove that this card has a lot more juice than what the stock settings allow.

We knew of this card's multimedia capabilities before we received it, but we didn't know if it would be able to handle some of the top DirectX 9.0c and higher games out today. Unfortunately, we can't recommend this card for high resolution gaming, but that doesn't mean it isn't a decent gaming video card. Users will just have to adjust their game settings accordingly to enjoy a lag free experience. It also should be noted that this card is an extreme overclocker, but the performance increase didn't help us squeeze too many more frames out of our games. This card is perfect for multimedia machines and entry-level gaming rigs.