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AMD’s Radeon HD2400 and HD2600XT

By Jon Peddie

Last we told you about AMD shipping the new midrange and entry-level AIBs based on the R600 architecture, and built in 65-nm technology. This week we got a basket full of them and ran some tests.

Table 1: AMD’s ATI Radeon HD24/600 XT/Pro pricing.

The AIBs come in two versions, the “Pro” and the “XT,” and within those classifications there are four memory choices and sizes for the 390 million transistor–based HD2600, with the Pro being available with 512 MBytes in either DDR2, DDR3, GDDR3, or GDDR4 depending on supplier, while the 180 million transistor HD2400 gives you the choice of 256 MBytes in DDR2 or GDDR3 on the XT version. So you end up with seven products to choose from.

AMD offers a SRP and we checked the web on June 23 and found only one place where there was any pricing (http://www.pricespy.co.nz/pno_10668.html and http://www.pricespy.co.nz/pno_10669.html), which gave us the data in Table 2.

Table 2: AMD’s ATI Radeon HD2400/2600 benchmark.

This is a little confusing because there are so many combinations it’s difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison. AMD says the HD2600 XT is competitive to Nvidia’s GeForce 8600 GT, and the HD2600 Pro is competitive to the GeForce 8500 GT, while the HD 2400 XT is designed to compete with the GeForce 7300 GT and the GeForce 8400 GS, and the HD2400 Pro will compete with the GeForce 7300 GS—you got that?

We installed these boards in our Vista-based Crossfire system and ran them, getting the results shown in Table 3 on an AMD 5200 2.61 GHz using AMD’s latest drivers (8.380.9).

Table 3: More AMD benchmarks: Ruby’s not gonna like this

Nvidia no longer sends us AIBs to test, so we can’t give you any comparisons. We’ve been borrowing Nvidia AIBs from eVGA but don’t want to be a pest and wear out our welcome.

In addition to the graphics capabilities, AMD says both GPUs feature UVD (Unified Video Decoder) technology. UVD is a hardware feature that offloads video decoding from the CPU to the GPU to help lower system power consumption. UVD is designed to be used in a range of video applications such as watching Blu-ray, HD DVD, or standard-definition movies, according to AMD. And, Silicon Optix has a new HD HQV test, but our HD drive hasn’t arrived yet so we’ll have to run those tests next.

Conclusions

The AIBs show well in the benchmark tests and scale nicely against the HD2900XT. We can’t make a benchmark/dollar analysis because it’s not clear (at this time) what the real prices are, and what we found vs. what AMD is suggesting is pretty far apart. AMD says the boards are shipping, but to whom and where, we couldn’t find too many. And none to buy, so it must still be early days for the channel.

Radeon HD2900XT redux

AMD taunted us with new drivers and said they was the bestest ever, for sure. Well, that was a goad we couldn’t resist so we unloaded the current drivers, and the HD2600s and stuck in the 2900xt, downloaded the new special drivers and ran the tests (all damn long BTW).

Time to go south and visit old Juarez

Next we ran a series of test using the DirectX 10 benchmark provided by the Call of Juarez program. We couldn’t see any difference from our last set of tests.

Table 4: Call of Juarez benchmark results with new driver.

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