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XpertVision Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR3 Sonic

By Vincent Chang - 21 Jul 2007

The XpertVision Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR3 Sonic

The XpertVision Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR3 Sonic

Like many of XpertVision's graphics cards, this Sonic comes with a red PCB. Compared to the GDDR4 version, the board is a fair bit shorter and is more inline with other cards of its mid-range caliber. The black circular heatsink with the cooler fan in the center is also another familiar sight that has been used before in other XpertVision cards and it is as quiet as usual. This is not surprising since the 65nm core in the Radeon HD 2600 XT is not as warm as previous Radeon GPUs so the fan can afford to run at a more leisurely spin.

XpertVision has been using this circular orb cooler for quite a few models and it is found also on this Radeon HD card. It's slightly thicker than a standard single slot cooler so you should make sure there are no immediate adjacent cards in your system.

Underneath that cooler are memory chips from Qimonda, rated at 1.3ns. This card also took an additional 512MB of system memory in the form of HyperMemory when we installed it in our test system. So that's a total frame buffer size of 768MB!

The core clock is set at 800MHz, which is similar for both the GDDR3 and GDDR4 versions of the Radeon HD 2600 XT. Each core has 120 stream processing units as ATI reckons them and you can get more architectural details in our previous article . The Radeon HD 2600 XT has a 256-bit internal ring bus memory architecture but the connecting bus to the memory chips is only 128 bits wide. GDDR3 memory chips from Qimonda running at 1600MHz DDR and they are rated at 1.3ns, though we found little information about this SKU on Qimonda's webpage. This clock speed of 1600MHz however seems to be slightly faster than some other GDDR3 models in the market, which are clocked at 1400MHz. So far, the only practical difference between the GDDR3 and GDDR4 versions of the Radeon HD 2600 XT is in their memory clocks so we should expect performance to be of a similar level. Additionally, the XpertVision is capable of using system memory via ATI's HyperMemory technology and 512MB of memory was taken from our Windows XP test system that had a total of 2GB of memory installed. That brings the total frame buffer size of 768MB on our test system. The card can utilize up to 1GB of system memory if necessary, with the caveat that there is at least 2GB of RAM present and XpertVision only recommends that for the 64-bit version of Windows XP and Windows Vista.

It's a mid-sized card that's not as long as the high-end ones and the PCB looks quite clean and sparse.

HDCP support comes standard on Radeon HD cards and the XpertVision is no different.

The Radeon HD 2600 XT requires a bridge connector for CrossFire and unfortunately, XpertVision did not include it in the package. Also missing is the DVI-to-HDMI converter though naturally HDCP support is present for both the dual-link DVI outputs like in all Radeon HD graphics cards. The other items we found in the package included the usual drivers and a game, Xpand Rally Extreme, which is hardly an A-list title. Still, we were actually surprised to find a game bundle from XpertVision in the first place. Here's the total package contents besides the graphics card:-

  • 1 x DVI-to-VGA adaptor
  • 1 x 9-pin mini-DIN to Component dongle
  • Driver CD
  • User manual
  • Xpand Rally Extreme
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