MSI Radeon HD 2600 Pro Noise Free Edition Crossfire
Sadly, MSI’s Radeon HD 2600 Pro suffers from the same problem as its big sister, the 2600 XT – a large capacitor on the PCB interferes with the Crossfire installation. This is too bad, since MSI’s passively cooled version is the perfect candidate for dual-card operation. After all, the single card only warms up to between 40°C and 53°C.
Luckily, despite the cramped quarters with two cards installed, benchmarking was not a problem, since we used an open (i.e. caseless) setup and did not fix the boards on place. With PEG slots spaced the way they are on most motherboards, you can forget about using this exact combination of cards in a Crossfire setup inside a case. However, combining this card with other boards works just fine, as long as the Noise Free Edition is inserted in the first PEG slot. Otherwise, the cooler on the back may interfere if your other card uses a large cooler. You can find a few pictures detailing the installation and possible combinations as well as pointing out potential difficulties below.
The Crossfire setup is detected without a problem, and the two Radeon HD 2600 Pros operate completely stably as a duo. In Battlefield 2142, the dual-card setup offers performance gains between 43 and 71 percent. Here, the performance boost is actually less pronounced at higher resolutions. Doom 3 sees a performance boost between 14 and 82 percent. Again, the cards run out of steam at 1600 x 1200. Oblivion makes very good use of the additional rendering power. Frame rate almost doubles in this game, with performance increasing by at least 86 percent. Prey gets between 66 and 89 percent more performance out of the graphics duo. This time, the performance boost remains evident even into the high resolutions.
Overall, the dual-card configuration with its cumulative frame rate of 1033.2 fps trumps the 731.2 fps of the single-card setup by 41.3 percent. Two of MSI’s Noise Free cards cost about €164. The slightly slower HIS Radeon HD 2600 XT Turbo for €112 (cumulative frame rate 977.8 fps) and Colorful’s Geforce 8600 GT for €90 (cumulative frame rate 975 fps) make good alternatives.
First ! e vai!
"The HIS card only comes with DVI connectors, which makes dual-link a sensible choice for the 1920 resolution."
Uh. No, it really doesn't.
The HDMI(1.2 and below) type A connector is equivalent to
a single-link DVI-D connector; the adaptor is purely
mechanical. Dual-link DVI is equivalent to the HDMI type
B connector, which is largely unused (although I have
hopes, because HDMI 1.3 type B can do 680MPix/s).
1920x1080p/60 fits quite nicely through the bandwidth
limit (165MHz) of an HDMI 1.2 type A connector, and
equally well through a single-link DVI connector -
as you can tell by the multitude of single-link DVI
24" 1920x1200@60Hz monitors on the market.
Dual-link DVI would give you 48bpp colour support at
1920x1080, but that's irrelevant if only a single link
is being used, via an HDMI adaptor. Also, the DVI
connector is perfectly capable of transmitting the
audio component of HDMI (the audio component uses the
same signal wires as the video), if it can be routed
to the card. Whether the content permits the audio to
be routed without HDCP is beyond my expertise.
Also, at the risk of testing my mathematical abilities:
"In Windows XP, the performance delta between the two cards in cumulative frame rate is now less than 20fps (Geforce 8800GTS 1878.9 fps, Radeon HD 2900 XT 1809.6 fps)."
That sounds like "less than 70fps" to me (not that it
makes much difference, obviously - they *are* close.)