The Radeon HD 2600 Pro offers much better performance. Compared to Nvidia’s 8500 GT, you get 50 percent performance more performance for only €10 more. The Radeon 2600 XT does a little better where the price performance ratio is concerned (for the ATI cards), costing 0.096 Euro/frame where the 2600 Pro costs 0.112 Euro/frame. For comparison, the Geforce 8600 GT costs 0.091 Euro/frame. However, the two products are so close in pricing (72 to 90 Euros) that the cost for shipping and handling or a minor price adjustment may tip the balance one way or the other.

On the whole HIS’ Radeon HD 2600 Pro is a marvellous product. It sports a UV-light sensitive fan casing, an IceQ cooler with a very quiet fan, and increased clock speeds that are guaranteed to work by the manufacturer and are preconfigured independently of the driver. While MSI’s HD 2600 Pro uses 256 MB of DDR3 memory, HIS opts for 512 MB of the DDR2 variety. This trade-off pays off. In the overall performance, HIS’ larger, slower RAM (525MHz) beats the smaller, faster RAM (700MHz) on the MSI card. For the most part, the larger memory allows better performance at higher resolutions.

The card’s 3D performance is sufficient to play any current game at maximum detail level. If you plan to play more complex titles such as Oblivion or want to run your games at higher resolutions, you may need to disable FSAA or shadows. To make up for this, you can enable HDR rendering or blooming effects, which is a great boon visually to games like Oblivion, Rogue Universe or Two Worlds.

The 2600 Pro’s power consumption is comparable to that off the 8600 GT. The IceQ cooler handles the chip’s heat extremely well. In 2D mode, the card idles at 40 °C, under 3D load, the temperature climbs only slightly to 46°C.

The stock frequency of a Radeon 2600 Pro’s graphics processor (GPU) is 600 MHz, but HIS raises the GPU frequency to 650 MHz. This setting is independent of the driver, as it is preconfigured on the card. The video memory of an HD 2600 Pro card usually runs at 400 MHz. Again, HIS uses higher settings in its Turbo version, increasing the memory speed to 525 MHz.

Be warned! Additional overclocking voids your card’s warranty, so any OC-experiments you choose to conduct are at your own risk. Although the IceQ card already runs at higher clock speeds than a standard version, there is still some headroom left. We used the ATI/AMD driver from the company’s website for out OC tests. The Overdrive section has received a slight revision in version 7.9 of the Catalyst driver suite. The Auto-Tune feature now switches to a second monitor that displays GPU load and temperature while the optimal clock speed is determined for the GPU and memory.

This process takes a fair bit of time and doesn’t always represent a completely reliable result. Before you can use the higher clock speeds determined by the tool, you have to test your settings with the ‘Test Custom Clock’ button. If the test is successful, the card can be set to use the new frequencies by clicking ‘Accept’. In our testbed system, our review sample was able to reach 740 MHz (GPU) and 590 MHz (memory) without any difficulty and was completely stable at these speeds.