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| by Michael "SKYMTL" Hoenig | June 28, 2007 | ||
| Photos Photos     The reference HD2600 XT is clad in ATI red through and through; from the PCB to the heatsink. The back plate has the dual-DVI connectors and the HDTV-out connector as well. All of AMD’s mainstream cards are equipped with their now-standard (finally) Crossfire connector. Each card takes a pair of Crossfire bridges and AMD will supply one bridge per card. The bottom of the card doesn’t really show us much other than the fact that the GDDR4 memory chips are arrayed in a 4x 64MB layout to give a total of 256MB of ram.   The cooler on the HD2600 XT is a single-slot solution which is quite long and has a fire motif on it much like the HS2900 XT. Within the plastic housing are rows of rectangular copper pipes which are used to disperse the heat coming off of the GPU and the ram modules. Unlike some graphics card coolers, this one directly touches the ram chips and it provides them with active cooling. Size Comparison  Herein lies a bit of a problem for the HD2600 XT which it comes to HTPC use: it is LONG for a mainstream card. At 9” long, it is the length of an 8800GTS card though the lack of a PCI-E power connector does save it some overall length over the 8800-series card. Both the 8600-series cards are particularly pint-sized compared to this AMD monster. If you are in the market to use this as a HTPC card, please grab a tape measure and measure the size of your HTPC case before you purchase this card. Or, move a rung downwards and but the shorter HD2600 PRO. | ||
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