The high-end spectrum of video cards is ruled by a mere few, but on the low to mid-ranged market, the choices are plentiful. With fewer dollars for consumers to play with, the wrong choice will result in a card not well suited for their needs. Cards get very specialized at the sub-$200 price point, and while they are not going to be gaming kings like +$400 hardware, expectations are they should be able to support modern software and provide flexibility in the application the buyer decides upon. With this in mind MSI has taken up the competition in designing a somehow different Radeon HD 2600 XT version, which comes pre-overclocked out of the box and offering greater performance and game play. - Viper Lair

MSI Radeon HD 2600 XT Diamond OC Edition Review

The Radeon HD 2600 XT Diamond OC Edition is MSI's vision of the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT. The artwork on the box has a Borg Queen inspired avatar and is complemented with a variety of marketing points to draw attention of the potential buyer. The key graphics is the OC Edition which in MSI's Diamond series of video cards means these are factory overclocked. Granted, overclocking is pretty easy with the variety of tools available online, but this overclock out of the box is fully covered by warranty by MSI. The MSI red, product model and female avatar are present on the card's cooling surface as well.

The PCB surface itself is black. AMD's reference card runs along at 800MHz core built on the 65nm fab process. The MSI Radeon HD 2600 XT Diamond overclocks the core to 850MHz. And as you already might know DirectX 10 with Shader Model 4.0 is supported. The Radeon HD 2600 XT Diamond OC Edition has 512MB of Samsung GDDR4 memory. Like the GPU core, the memory is also overclocked from the reference 2.2GHz to 2.3GHz on MSI's product. The memory here is not actively or passively cooled, so right now, we don't have high hopes for overclocking success with the memory.

The MSI Radeon HD 2600 XT Diamond OC Edition already comes overclocked out of the box, with 850/1150MHz for the core and memory respectively. Neither RivaTuner or PowerStrip allowed us to make any overclocking that had a visible impact on performance. ATI Overdrive allowed a 6MHz increase on the core and 21MHz on the memory. Needless to say, the overclock wasn't especially impressive but consider that ATI's reference speeds are 800/2100MHz core and memory. To be truthful, we were a bit surprised we did squeeze anything out of the memory considering the lack of cooling on the chips.

On the performance front, the MSI Radeon HD 2600 XT Diamond OC Edition fared well against the GeForce 8600 GTS. With more DirectX 10 games coming in over the fence, the Radeon HD 2600 XT Diamond OC Edition would make a fairly good mid-ranged choice if you are looking to keep your video card upgrade budget under $200.