Sapphire don't mess with the green camp, they're ATI through and through. This means that they don't just deal with the high-end cards though, it also means they cover mid-range and budget cards, even old technologies like AGP. In fact Sapphire has always paid attention to the full range of potential buyers who are interested in an ATI based video card. This could be the most basic card, to a full fetched water cooling edition. And not only do they look forward, ther eis always one product on their selves that is looking backwards and by doing so still supporting the shrinking AGP market. Today we have the Radeon HD 2600 PRO 512MB from Sapphire on an AGP platform. - XSReviews

Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 PRO AGP Graphics Review

The Radeon HD 2600 PRO features the RV630 chip, a cut down version of the R600. It features 120 stream processors with each of the first four being able to retire a single floating point instruction per clock and the fifth deals with special functions such as sine and cosine. Each of the 64 clusters can execute a maximum of six instructions per clock consisting of five shading instructions and one branch. The RV630 also features ATI's unified video decoder. This has been compared to NVIDIA's PureVideo technology which offers similar functions except it doesn't allow for VC-1 offloading like UVD does.

The box is black with purple and white styling. It also features a gun toting, red headed female displaying her midrif which should draw in a few gamers. In the top right is quite a proud sticker displaying the inclusion of 512MB of DDR2 memory on the card. The back has a run down of what's in the box in several different languages and a bit of spiel on the product itself. Oh, and another sticker telling you that this is the AGP version and that the HDMI features are not supported. Of course other features of the Radeon HD 2600 PRO are supported such as DirectX 10 except naturally the CrossFire or multi-GPU function.

The Radeon HD 2600 AGP doesn't differ much from it's PCI Express counterpart. It has a similar style cooler, which takes air from underneath the card, and blows it across a heatsink hidden by a large blue shroud before exiting towards the front of the case. Like most coolers, the fan features a Sapphire sticker, and the shroud some Sapphire styling. One noticeable difference between the two versions of this card, is the AGP to PCI Express bridge chip code named Rialto. This allows for what is essentially a PCI Express chip to be used on an AGP board, and converting the signal towards the AGP interface.

Although the Radeon HD 2600 PRO card is much newer than the Radeon X1950 PRO, it really falls behind in almost everything. It's slower, not much cheaper, louder and even though its part of the HD series, it doesn't support HDMI. It's main advantage over previous generations of AGP cards is that it's small, which would lead to it being perfect for media PC's, were it capable of all HD media features and were it not so loud. Sapphire have had a good go at putting together a more modern AGP solution, but for gamers there is little to be gained over a Radeon X1950 PRO, so pay the extra tenner and get that instead.