Sapphire 512MB Radeon HD 2600 XT

A Good Alternative, or No Good at All?

It's time for our second hardware review. This time, it's the rival of what we reviewed last. The HD 2600 XT is built to compete with the GeForce 8600GT, not the GTS, which is good for reasons we shall soon see. The reference specs include an 800 MHz core clock, a 1400 MHz memory clock, 120 Stream Processors, DirectX 10 compatibility, and Shader Model 4.0. It stacks up well with the 8600GT with those numbers, since the 8600GT only has a 540 MHz core clock and 32 Stream Processors. However, the GT has double the pixel pipelines and texture modeling units, so they about balance out, stat-wise. The card we reviewed, the XFX 8600GT XXX, is not your reference board, though. It sported a core clock rate of 620 MHz and a 1600 MHz memory clock. Let's find out more out our card du jour.

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