It's been quite hectic lately with these Shader Model 4.0 cards being out. Not only NVIDIA came up as a winner here in terms of availability, the performance of the G80 based cards was more than standard when compared against the R600 boards. The end of June marked AMD's launch of ATI Radeon HD 2600 series which were pretty late anyway. Take a note though that mainstream and entry level cards are always overdue and flagship high-end products come first to the game. For todays reading pleasure we have the PowerColor Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of onboard 128-bit GDDR3 memory. There is as well a GDDR4 model, but it wasn't available at that time. - Bjorn3D

PowerColor Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB Card Review

This particular SKU will be appreciated the most, at least until the Radeon HD 2900 PRO gets here. At a low price of $100, the Radeon HD 2600 XT will give you the ability to play HD movies and latest games with reasonable frame rates. Theoretically that is, until we go into some benchmarks and prove the theory. The R600 is the base for the rest of SKU's. Enthusiast, mainstream and entry level cards share a lot of characteristics. In fact, the R6xx chips are first graphics processors based on Xbox 360 GPU, also called Xenos. They feature unified shader architecture that can process variety of shader type operations.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 2600 XT does not feature a standard cooling system. Instead it comes with a huge heatsink and blower which is in fact noise free. Just like the Radeon X1600, it does not carry an external power supply connector which is a good thing, so smaller fab process, draws less power. There aren't any RAM chips on the back though as always we'd like to see heatsinks on the front ones. The aftermarket cooler may raise a bit of a concern especially in media PC's where space is a dominating factor. Because the heatsink is rather large, it will occupy two slots.

Judging by the specifications alone, we thought the Radeon HD 2000 family would perform a whole lot better. Reading various articles and checking out benchmarks concludes that AMD didn't do well in terms of improving overall performance. Enabling anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering across all HD series takes frame rates down to a ground where as previous generaion of Radeon's coped much better with this extra eye-candy. The PowerColor Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR3 does deliver acceptable gaming performance, but looking at GeForce 8600 GT it's a much better buy when it comes to price to performance ratio.

These mid-range and/or entry-level cards use almost no power yet they come with dual link, HDMI with audio and UVD support. Think about that when building your home media PC. The other thing is the actual price which varies between $95-110. If you are a casual gamer and love to watch HD content you should seriously consider PowerColor Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR3 edition. On the other hand if you're just looking for more frame rates and DirectX 10 support grab the Radeon HD 2900 XT or GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card.