Gaming

Company of Heroes

The card performed well in this game. It's powerful enough to provide you with a playable frame rate even on maximum detail settings.







At a high resolution, with all the details maxed out and with antialiasing and anisotropic filters on, HD2600XT GDDR4 still managed to produce a playable frame rate.

F.E.A.R.

The game did well here until we set the resolution to 1600x1200 with AA and AF on.







At 1600x1200 with 4xFSAA and 16xAF, overclock won't help. With maximum detail setting you simply cannot get a playable frame rate.


Bio Shock

At lower resolutions, even with AA and AF on, the card had no trouble. However, at 1600x1200 with AA and AF off, the reference speed card just couldn't churn out a playable number of FPS.







The overclocked Club 3D HD 2600 XT card with AA and AF on didn't do any better, either – the result still wasn't playable.

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Demo

At low resolutions and no AA and AF, both the overclocked and the reference card results are satisfactory. However, 1280x960 with 2xAA and 8xAF results in minimum playable frame rate.







At high resolutions, no matter what the speed, AA and AF, this card just won't give you the full gaming experience.

Serious Sam 2

This cute game didn't pose a threat to this card. It ran well on all resolutions with AA and AF on, and it scored playable FPS in every scenario.







S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

In this game, even the card on reference speeds scores more than enough needed for gaming.







On maximum detail settings with AA and AF on, the card scores over 50 FPS.

Unreal Tournament 3 Demo

In UT3, Club3D HD 2600 XT scores playable FPS. However, problems arose when we increased the resolution to 1600x1200 with AA and AF on.







World in Conflict

World in Conflict is a different story altogether; the card simply can't handle it. The only playable FPS setting was 1024x768 with AA and AF turned off.







Higher resolution or turning AA and AF on are just too much for this card, and you won't get a playable frame rate.


Conclusion

Club3D Radeon HD2600XT GDDR4 card follows the reference design with a large, but quiet cooler. The core runs at stock 800MHz, and the same goes for memory, which runs at stock 1100MHz (effective 2200 MHz).

Since the graphics memory clocks were significantly higher than with GDDR3 memory equipped cards, we expected much better performance. Compared to cards with memory at 1400MHz, this card didn't show a significant performance increase. Catalyst limited the overclock to 857 MHz, but with different overclocking tools you could probably do better, as we've seen these cores easily reaching 900 MHz.

Although the card can handle all the games available today, some of them with maximum detail settings, we still can't say it's a significant performance increase compared to our previously tested ATI Radeon HD2600XT with GDDR3 memory.

The cheapest we've found costs €111 + shipping, while the Club3D HD2600XT with DDR3 memory will cost you less than €8 less. The price difference is justified and we can recommend the GDDR4 cards, as the price difference is really negligible.

Since they're in the same price range, Club3D HD2600XT GDDR4 is an interesting alternative to Nvidia's 8600GT series, mostly due to its multimedia capabilities. This is one of the lowest priced mainstream cards of all time and buying one of these will definitely bring some nice gaming capabilities to your PC.



Tested and reviewed by Sanjin Sejdinovic