Power Color Rolls Out its Own HD 2400 / 2600 Series

AMD has the nasty habit of fighting battles they know they can't win. And if you look at the recent history of CPUs you will notice that they lost too many fights to be taken seriously, most of them related to the price of CPUs. And as it turns out the fact that they acquired Ati didn't help. Because they're trying it again. And the 65nm GPUs might help them win the battle for the first time ever. Because AMD has started one battle that they might actually win. For example, how does a sub $100 video card based on the HD 2600 series sound for you?

PowerColor's for example, has just released its two HD 2400 / 2600 lines and they're selling them dirty cheap. Starting with the HD2400 Pro DDR2, HD2400Pro SCS3 (Passive Edition) and ending with faster models such as the HD2400XT with and without HDMI this line is a best bang for the buck. Even the fastest XT series with 256 GDDR3 @ 1400MHz will cost less than $100. However all these cards will have limited bus access due to a very narrow 64-bit memory interface.

HD2600 is pretty different from its brother though. Four models are using different memory setups and speeds in order to enter different market segments. The first is the HD2600Pro which comes with 256MB of DDR2-800 memory. Another HD2600Pro this time with 512MB uses same memory type as the 256MB one and has the same 600MHz clock speed.

Switching to the XT line, the first HD2600XT comes packed with 256MB GDDR-3 while the second HD2600XT uses a more advanced 256MB GDDR-4. GPU clock is the same. However there is a big difference between the clockspeeds of the GDDR chips as the first one works at 1400MHz-DDR while the faster GDDR-4 model has a blazing fast speed of 1.1GHz (or 2.2GHz-DDR). I'm not going to talk much about the prices since you can check them out for yourself but if you want a mainstream card from Ati, this is the moment to get it.

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