AMD ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 Series review

Yay, they're here!

Oh good gosh people, that certainly took a while didn't it? But yes, today finally is the day we can bring you an in depth review of AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 products. Two products armed with loads of features to attack the budget and mid-range market with prices that are really interesting.

AMD has now launched no less than five desktop graphics cards, in the high-end range you'll see the 80nm fabrication process Radeon HD 2900 XT, a product that is still discussed a lot for sure. But there are four other products as well. ATI is also launching an all new Radeon 2400 and 2600 series (low- and mid-range). These products will be based on the newer 65nm fabrication production process.

Let's have a brief overview of the five new graphics cards and on the next page we'll go a little deeper into the silicon that is Radeon HD 2000.

• Radeon HD 2900 XT
• Radeon HD 2600 XT
• Radeon HD 2600 Pro
• Radeon HD 2400 XT
• Radeon HD 2400 Pro

Obviously for all products, we are talking about the next-gen product series here and that means 100% DirectX 10 compatible products, so you'll understand that we'll also talk a little about DX10, the Unified Shader Architecture with those lovely stream processors; a new function on the 2000 Series called Tessellation and last but not least, Avivo HD.

So what we'll do today is go deep into the technology that is the Radeon HD 2400 and 2600. We'll have an overview of the product line-up, the features, do a good number of gaming performance tests and, after the 2900 XT UVD debacle, we'll test Avivo HD with a self-developed performance test with the help of a Blu-Ray and HD-DVD title.

In total we'll test three cards today, the Radeon HD 2400 XT 256MB (ATI reference), the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR3 256MB (PowerColor) and the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 (ATI reference).

Next page please!