Nick Race29 February 2008, 3:54 PM
Although Nvidia’s 8000 series graphics cards have been dominating the market for some time now, ATI’s 2000 series cards just keep getting better and better.
Our initial look at the HD 2900XT, ATI’s flagship card, was a little disappointing, with pretty poor benchmark results when compared to similarly priced cards from the competition. In the few months the HD2000 series of ATI cards have been available, heaps of work has gone on under the hood in the driver package —and performance is increasing at a very respectable level.
Gigabyte’s version of the upper-mid-range HD2600XT card is one of those solutions that fits the feature set (and price range) of the new ATI cards perfectly. This particular part is a 65nm GPU, running at 800MHz, with an 1100MHz memory clock. A 128-bit memory bus and 256MB of GDDR3 support the 120 shader units.
This implementation from Gigabyte includes a very large, well-ventilated fanless cooling system and, with the new video processing AVIVO HD tools included in the 2600 series, this card makes for a killer home theatre or low-noise graphics option. It’s got grunt enough for games as well, scoring 4,695 in 3DMark06.
AVIVO adds off-CPU acceleration for deinterlacing and picture scaling, as well as dedicated functionality for decoding HD codecs. This will lower CPU usage during playback, further decreasing noise and heat. Add HDMI output to that (a full HDCP chain) and you’ve got a top-notch card for video and games.