ATI has for long been known for its infamous paper launches, and with the launch of the HD 2000 series history repeated itself. While the HD 2900 XT arrived last month and caused quite a lot of disappointment by not dethroning NVIDIA’s high-end card, the card still offered a decent performance/buck ratio though, at least in 3DMark. The gaming performance was lackluster and made many turn against ATI/AMD. Many were hoping that ATI would repent and bring new glory to the mid-range and low-end segment after NVIDIA’s launch of the surprisingly weak 8600/8500/8400 series
The Radeon 2600/2400 series did not however, bring anything new when it comes to gaming performance. Both series have a hard time performing equally to the 8600 and 8400 series and the only thing that really speaks to their advantage is the UVD processor.
The technical specifications are basically a 800 MHz GPU, 1100 MHz 256 MB memory with a 128 bit bus, 128 shader processor and 8 TMUs for the 2600 XT, while the Pro versions come with some varying memory and GPU frequencies. The 2400 series comes with 40 shader processors, 4 TMUs, up to 700 MHz GPU and 512 MB memory at up to 800 MHz.
Many have chosen to test the card with Windows XP and DirectX 9, based on the fact that this is what most people will be using with these cards. We can’t say we fully agree with this though, but on the other hand, the cards disappoint in DirectX 10 and Vista as well, although the situation is better there. AMD has set some rather attractive prices on the cards though and considering the price/performance ratio things look a lot better, but we were perhaps hoping for a little more than this. The 2600 can be found for as little as $100 and 2400 for as little as $50. Not sure if we want to call these card mid-range, but they sure are affordable.
Below we’ve gathered some reviews of the 2600 and 2400 series.
:: Guru3D :: OCWorkbench :: Anandtech :: Thetechlounge :: techPowerUp!
:: HotHardware :: Technic3D :: Presence PC ::
