There are a plethora of Radeon HD 2600 series cards available to buy and many manufacturers have applied different customisations to their specific models. Some are supplied with silent coolers, others with factory overclocked settings and then there is the product we are checking out today. VisionTek have taken the Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB and redesigned it to perfectly suit low profile PC's or media centres. Part of this redesign is a native HDMI port which when added to full high definition video support could make the card an essential purchase. We will be putting the card through a number of games to find out if media centre enthusiasts have a new must have purchase. - DriverHeaven

VisionTek Radeon HD 2600 XT Graphics Card Review

VisionTek package their card in a very compact box, far smaller than most. Inside we find the bundled extras which include instructions on how to configure HDMI audio, display cables and various brackets for use in low profile systems. This is an ideal bundle for the product as it ensures that almost every need is catered for. Our only concern is that the brackets were loose in the box during shipping and could have caused some damage to the card, a small box or compartment within the main packaging would easily solve this. And a low profile PCB design is used for this particular Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card.

The low profile design ensures that the card can be used in standard desktops as well as low profile office or media PC's. There is a small cooler attached to the core and front memory chips but the memory on the back of the card is not cooled. There are three display outputs available on the product in its shipping configuration, the first two are the standard DVI and VGA outputs and the third is HDMI. The HDMI output can be used with the bundled HDMI cable or converted to DVI, again using one of the bundled cables. As we mentioned earlier the bracket can be changed to install on a low profile system.

The core used on the Radeon HD 2600 XT is ATI's RV630 a 65nm chip which has 120 shader units and supports DirectX 10. The core runs at 800MHz with the 256MB of GDDR3 clocked at 1400MHz on a 128-bit memory bus. The memory used is Hynix 1.4ns, which is rated up to 1400MHz and therefore is running exactly to specification. In addition to the 2D and 3D features this card also supports the now standard video features such as HDCP and HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray acceleration. This is also quite essential to be considered as a product that could power a media centre or a home theatre PC as such.

We used RivaTuner to overclock the VisionTek Radeon HD 2600 XT and knowing that the memory was already near its published limit we started there. After a short while we discovered that the highest stable speed we could use was 1470MHz. Given the specifications of the chips used on the card this is quite impressive. Moving on to the core we were conscious that the cooler is designed to be compact and quiet. Despite its size we were able to achieve a reasonably impressive speed of 853MHz, 53MHz above stock. This might not be the greatest overclocking, but considering the cooler used it is more than enough.

The VisionTek Radeon HD 2600 XT has impressed us in many ways throughout our benchmarks. Firstly the card is compact enough to fit in all but the smallest systems and the option to change brackets to suit our needs was a great feature. It was important to us that the product was able to game at a recognised high definition resolution given the obvious target audience and in our gaming benchmarks the results were very good. Clearly some minor detail level changes are required to achieve completely perfect frame rates in some of the latest games but this would be the same for any stock speed Radeon HD 2600 XT.

High definition acceleration works perfectly for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD and the built in HDMI port which outputs a HDCP signal as well as audio and video make this a great card for media enthusiasts. There is only one thing stopping this card from being the number one choice for any media centre and that is the use of a fan heatsink combination. If VisionTek would release a version with passive cooler such as the Zalman VNF100 the product will be perfect.