ATI Radeon 2600 Pro

The Radeon 2600 is built on the same lines of architecture as the Radeon 2600

XT, except that it has a lesser clock speed and different memory configuration.

It's more compact compared to the 2600XT card, though comes with a slightly

noisier fan. The unavailability of CrossFire Connector is a slight disadvantage.

Main specs include 600 MHz of clock speed and 256 MB of DDR3 RAM. It also has an

HDMI capability and is HDCP complaint, besides having the regular support for

HDTV and DVI outputs.

Targeted mainly toward budget-conscious gamers, this card can play all the

DirectX 10 games for you. A score of 3509 in 3D Mark06 is very good for any

budget-range card and is 500 3D Mark more than the NVIDIA 8500GT. In 'Company of

Heroes' it gave an average of 20 fps at max setting (i.e. 4xAA/16xAF at 1280x960

resolutions), which is decent and is comparable to what we got from NVIDIA 8500

GT. In BIOSHOCK also it performed decently well with an average of 23 fps at

1280x1024 resolutions. Coming to some of the DirectX 9 games like FEAR, it gave

an average of 20 fps at max setting, which is very similar to the score we got

from NVIDIA 8500 GT.

Bottomline: With all its features and decent

performance a good choice for budget-conscious gamers.