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PowerColor HD2600 Pro 512MB


Date
: 09/7/07 – 05:16:04 PM

Author
:

Category
: Video Cards

Page 1 : Index

Manufacturer:
PowerColor Computer Inc.

Price:
$119.99 CND (NCIX.com) / $94.99 USD (Newegg.com)

It is that time of year again. You are being commissioned to build a system for a co-worker, family friend, or even your brother in-law. They won't need the highest set of components money can buy and will be on a set budget. You have picked out the rest of the system and all that is left is the video card with not much over $100 left. Onboard video just isn't going to cut it because they do have someone looking to play some games with the system so your only alternative is a mid-range graphics processor that is cheap but can hold its own in the gaming ring. PowerColor has exactly what you're looking for from the latest line of ATI video cards.

PowerColor is a subsidiary of TUL Corporation founded to become the face of their graphic processing division and has been regarded as one of the graphic processing pioneers since 1997. PowerColor has built its reputation by providing top quality hardware at a great value and backing it up with industry leading support. The PowerColor brand has stretched its reach from the U.S.A. to the Netherlands, China, and Taiwan providing increased service and product availability with its global positioning.

The ATI HD2000 series of video cards launched a few months ago and the full line of models available have been in the channels for a while now. Today we will be looking at the middle of the pack, the HD2600 Pro. The HD2600 Pro is actually at the bottom of the middle of the pack if you will. Going higher up the food chain there is the HD2600 XT followed by the HD2900 series and going down, the HD2400 series covers the entry level. The exact model we have here today is the PowerColor HD2600 PRO 512MB GDDR2 which should slot in somewhere slightly above the X1650 Pro series of the previous generation of graphics processors in 3D performance. There is always plenty of information to pour through with new graphics chipsets so let's get started.

Page 2 : Package

With the ATI lineup refresh, PowerColor has done a slight revision to their packages as well.

The basic principal of the PowerColor package is the same, put a mystic looking female warrior on the front, but the orientation of the package is now upright as opposed to lengthwise in previous packages I have received from them.

All of the pertinent information is easy to find on display in the upper right hand corner. We see the ATI, Crossfire, and Certified for Vista stickers along with the memory size and Pro nomenclature designating this the HD2600 Pro with 512MB of DDR2 memory.

The sides and rear of the package contain the same brushed aluminum theme with plenty of information occupying the rear panel of the package including a number of languages outlining the basic specifications.

Plenty of information is available on the rear of this package including a full list of chipset specifications presented here.

There is one last photo of the package that I would like to look at before moving on to the Specifications & Features section. The interior of the PowerColor package is the same as it has been for a while with ample protection and good organization of the hardware inside.

Page 3 : Specifications & Features

The new 2XXX series product line from ATI brings a number of new features to the games we love so much. The most advertised of which is the fact that these 2K series cards are capable of running DirectX 10. DirectX 10 is still in its infancy and the performance so far has not been great considering we haven't seen a big leap in graphic elements going from DirectX 9 to 10 in the few games that have either come out with a patch or been developed with DirectX 10 in mind. As time goes on, however, DirectX 10 will mature and the benefits of the additional geometry shader among other enhancements will be obvious.

There are a number of enhancements aside from DirectX 10 capability that the 2K series from ATI received. Among them are image quality enhancements with the Tessellation unit and new filtering abilities including anti-aliasing updates. Another major step forward in the new 65nm produced chips is what is called a Unified Shader Architecture. This simply means that all of the shaders are now combined into one "super-shader" if you will. This new Unified Shader can compute both vertex and pixel shaders as well as the new shader named geometry shaders. The Unified Shader will increase data throughput as you won't have any vertex or pixel shaders sitting idle while the other is working, all shaders will be able to do any kind of work. Combined with the fully distributed memory controller that was upgraded from the X1 series initial distributed memory controller, the new 2K series cards are a lot more efficient in how they handle data.

Performance in 3D gaming enhancements are not the only things ATI has focused on. The ATI AVIVO technology has been updated to AVIVO HD which includes HDMI v1.2 and HDCP support with Dual-Link DVI connections. Here is a brief quote from the ATI web site:

The line of cards that these enhancements covers are the flagship HD2900XT (R600), mid-range HD2600Pro & HD2600XT (RV630), and entry-level HD2400 Pro & HD2400XT (RV610). We are obviously looking at the lower half of the mid-range HD2600 Pro today from PowerColor. Let's have a look at the specifications of this particular PowerColor sample.

The PowerColor HD2600 Pro 512MB is an equal compilation of new tech and old. The new technology is obviously the brand new RV630 core and all of the features touched on above and the old is referring to the 512MB of onboard DDR2 memory. I was only expecting to see DDR3 memory but PowerColor has reserved DDR3/4 for the higher clocked HD2600 XT cards as well as a single HD2600 Pro model with clocks about half way between the model we have today and the XT models but with only 256MB or memory. I would love to see a comparison between this semi-XT model and the 512MB Pro model we are looking at right now.

Another chart pulled from the PowerColor web site outlines the rest of the specifications of this HD2600 PRO 512MB GDDR2. We can see that HDMI is obviously supported through the ATI DVI > HDMI connector which is not included in the package. This is a bit of a budget solution so it doesn't surprise me to see the lack of the DVI > HDMI connector. We are provided with a single DVI > VGA dongle and an S-Video > Composite connector. Speaking of the contents, let's move on to those now and get some visuals of what is listed here.

Page 4 : Package & Contents

We will now continue into the depths of the HD2600 box from where we left off in the Package section.

Power color boxes always protect the hardware inside without worry during shipping. Individual compartments keep the accessories from flopping around and the card itself is nestled nicely into its spot with no room to move.

The HD2600 is not a premium card and doesn't come with a premium package. Despite being a dual DVI card, PowerColor has only provided a single DVI > VGA connector but the rise of LCD panels has pushed the use of DVI anyway. The only TV out cable is that of the S-Video to composite video and the lack of any component leads is quite obvious. This card does have HDMI output capability but that is only through a DVI > HDMI connector that has to be purchased separately. On the right, along with the driver CD and quick install guide, is an insert making sure we know about the offer from Steam for ATI users for free copies of HL2: Lost Coast and HL2: Deathmatch.

The last piece of the puzzle is the card itself. Immediately, the overall look and size of the HD2600 Pro reminds me of a few other PowerColor cards that I have reviewed. The PowerColor X1300 Pro, X1550, and X1650 Pro all look very similar to this new HD2600 Pro having virtually the same size PCB. The fan and heatsink on this HD2600 Pro are fairly small and immediately concerns of a whiny fan stumble through my head.

The fan is a tiny 40cm unit recessed in a very small and lightweight heatsink that leaves barely any footprint on the video card. The X1650 Pro heatsink was much thicker, heavier, and had a much larger footprint leaving me to believe this card runs very cool but if there is no fan controlling ability, small fans like this always have the ability to be much louder than they need to be.

The HD2600 Pro contains a grand total of five capacitors seen above. A pair of 470µF Sanyo caps and three un-determined 1000µF are all you will find on the card. This graphics processor is not a very high powered one and the hardware running it shows. Overall though, this should again equate to a very cool running card with low power draw.

The 512MB of RAM used on the PowerColor HD2600 Pro is Hynix HY5PS121621C with the FP-25 bin. This DDR2 memory runs at 400MHz with a 2.5ns access time. If you do a Google search on this part number, you will find that this memory is used on a number of video cards including GeForce 8400GS and PowerColors own HD2400 Pro cards.

PowerColor labels the part number right on the PCB and we can see the part beginning of the part number here, LF R63B. It appears that this PCB design is used for this model only as there is not multiple part numbers listed here like seen on the PowerColor X1550.

As stated, this card comes complete with two dual-link DVI connections providing all the resolution power you need to run the biggest LCD panels along with the single TV out which appears to be a simple S-Video connection.

The backside of the card is quite un-assuming with not a whole lot back here aside from the rest of the Hynix DDR2 memory. The heatsink is held on with four small screws that will likely not interfere with anything on the motherboard. Speaking of which, we will now plug this little bad boy into a couple motherboards to ensure no fitment issues which is likely going to be the case.

Page 5 : Installation

The installation of this PowerColor HD2600 Pro is about as straight forward as a modern video card can get. There is barely a cooler on it and the 6.5" length of the card won't pose a problem in any system but lets have a look at the card in a couple of motherboards anyway, just because I have them lying around and I like taking photos.

We start the motherboard journey with a little blast from the past and the gem of the Socket 939 hay day, a DFI LanParty Ultra-D. The Ultra-D was notorious for getting the chipset heatsink covered by video cards but that is clearly not the case here. The length of the HD2600 Pro barely has it longer than the PCI-E 16X slot.

Moving the card over to a newer Abit IP-35 Pro we can easily see that the card isn't even going to interfere with the first PCI slot. The board is spaced as such to give us the extra room there but most modern video cards with dual slot coolers come so close to the top PCI slot on this motherboard that it isn't useful. The benefits of such a small heatsink are immediately apparent with the above photo.

Keeping with the Abit theme, we have a quick look from behind at the HD2600 Pro mounted in an Abit QuadGT, my favorite motherboard of all time for its superior Super Pi performance. Again, the Abit design of large gap below the top PCI-E 16X slot leaves the PCI-E 1X slot just below the video card clear and free for an expansion card of its own.

Unlike the Abit motherboards we just saw, Asus jams all of the slots together and even the minimalist heatsink on the PowerColor HD2600 Pro won't allow use of that top PCI slot. Perhaps a card would fit in there but it would completely block off the fan of the HD2600 Pro and I wouldn't recommend it. Other than that, the P5K3-Deluxe seems to have no other issues with the small HD2600 Pro.

The last of the motherboards I will test fit the HD2600 Pro in is another Asus unit, the P5N32-E SLI. Most people running a board like this would be using NVIDIA cards in SLI but I thought plugging it in would be worthwhile to someone out there. Again, like we have seen so far, there are absolutely no issues with the HD2600 Pro and in all honesty there shouldn't be. This video card is so small in all aspects that it should fit in every motherboard out there without so much as a small hiccup.

Page 6 : Test Setup, Software & Overclocking

This section is simply here to outline the system specifications that will be used to benchmark the PowerColor HD2600 Pro and to take a look at the software and overclocking. At the bottom of the list we can see that I have a handful of GPUs that I will be comparing the feature card with including equal competitors from the previous two generations of ATI video cards in the X1650 Pro and X800 GTO. There is also an NVIDIA based video card that will be a little bit stronger I believe based on its ranking in the NVIDIA hierarchy.

I have decided to clock my E6600 to 3.60GHz on my extremely reliable Asus P5B-Dlx for the video card benchmarks. The CPU speed may be a little higher than most people are running their C2D systems but this way the system won't provide any sort of bottleneck for the video cards. Not that these primarily mid-ranged cards are going to be held back by any Intel C2D based system but keep this in mind when looking at the results as the increased processor frequency and memory speed will raise numbers on certain benchmarks. Above is an image of the system as it was throughout the benchmarking and testing of the PowerColor HD2600 Pro.

After a quick download from the AMD web site, and by quick I mean lightning fast. Think 950KB/s fast for the 35MB Catalyst Control Center software which is a nice change for once. Maybe I am just use to the Asus site for driver downloads and youre lucky if they even work let alone come in fast. Either way, we can see that Catalyst 7.8 drivers have been installed and we are ready to go. I won't go much into the Catalyst Control Center software as there have been no changes to discuss from previous video cards.

I will mention that Catalyst Control Center icon in the system tray does give us full access to any and all options without even opening the software. Again this is nothing new but is quite handy so I figured I would give it a quick look before moving on to the overclocking of the PowerColor HD2600 Pro.

That is right, despite the HD2600 Pro being a budget video card, we still might as well see if there is any overclocking headroom. Unfortunately ATITool would not run with this video card installed and any combination of Catalyst 7.6, 7.7, or 7.8 drivers. The system would just become sluggish and ATITool would never open, even with just the driver and no Catalyst Control Center installed. Obviously a future update of ATITool will likely remedy this but for now, I have to stick with ATI Overdrive for the overclocking. We can see that Overdrive found that 650MHz core and 500MHz memory clocks were stable. During testing the core temp never exceeded 50C. I normally test temperatures with ATITool but obviously couldn't. I did run a lot of games at these clocks and got intermittent lock ups and artifacts. Dropping memory down to 490MHz seemed to take care of that. I also normally like to run a lot of 3DMark 06 Deep Freeze in a loop for an hour or two when testing GPU clocks, but as we will find out in the synthetic benchmark section, that wasn't possible.

Page 7 : Synthetic Benchmarks

As I alluded to on the previous page and the graph below clearly outlines, the HD2600 Pro would not run 3DMark 03/05/06 but had no problem with 3DMark 01. I am assuming a driver issue is at the heart of the problem but neither Catalyst 7.6, 7.7, or 7.8 would allow the newer 3DMark benchmarks to run.

3DMark 03 and 05 would simply lock up on the logo screen but 3DMark 06 took it one step further and provided the above for an effect before freezing. Needless to say, I am kind of disappointed because the 3DMark series is a great way to compare video cards in a controlled manor but all we have are the 3DMark 01 results.

The first indication of the performance capabilities of the HD2600 Pro in 3D gaming are not that good. We can see that the X800GTO and X1650 Pro have very little problem besting the HD2600 Pro in 3DMark 01. Keep in mind, however, that 3DMark 01 is from the DirectX 8.1 days and Pixel Shader 1.4 so not what we would call new technologies. Let's move on to some gaming results, I will start with the oldest and work our way forward. If my timeline is out of order, I apologize in advance.

Page 8 : FarCry Benchmarks

The first of the gaming benchmarks we will look at is the oldest and probably still my favorite. That is of course until September 25th of this year when the Crysis single player demo is slated to drop. We all know what Far Cry is at this point so I won't go into detailing the game to you, instead, I will simply discuss the benchmarking process used. To benchmark Far Cry I have turned to HardwareOC and their wonderful Far Cry benchmarking tool v1.8.

I have chosen to benchmark the River Level and set the Shader Model to auto so that all SM3.0 cards will run the benchmark in SM3.0. This means the X800 GTO will be running the benchmark using SM2.0 so keep that in mind when looking at the results. HDR was turned off as were Geometry Instancing and normal maps compression. Detail levels were all set to high in-game, so there is some room to increase frame rates by turning down some details if need be. Let's see how the HD2600 Pro did in Far Cry.

Well, I'm not sure what this says about the HD2600 Pro but it clearly shows that Far Cry is not its strong point. The closest competition for the PowerColor card in these benchmarks is going to be the X1650 Pro as they are most evenly matched but it is quite evident that the X6150 Pro has a fairly clear advantage at all resolutions. Hopefully it comes back swinging in some of the newer games.

Page 9 : Half-Life 2 Benchmarks

Next on the docket is the ever so popular Half-Life 2. Since Half-Life 2 has a time demo benchmarking ability built in, I simply created a time demo of the coast level and used the in-game benchmark feature to run it. All details are set at high like in Far Cry but Half-Life 2 isn't a big GPU hog so turning down detail levels shouldn't really be necessary.

I might have also gotten in a few rounds on-line with HL2 and I have to say that the game ran impeccably at 1680×1050. I normally don't game all that much because I am busy benchmarking and reviewing but it is hard to never play when you have a bunch of capable video cards in front of you.

As expected, the HD2600 Pro had no problem dispatching the X1650 Pro and we can clearly see that the game is certainly playable at 1680×1050 like I was doing. The HD2600 Pro almost keeps up with the X800GTO which is a bit un-expected. We also see that the HD2600 Pro takes quite a hit with 4xAnti Aliasing and 8xAnisotropic filtering but I would probably recommend playing at 1680×1050 over 1024×768 with the AA and AF turned on.

Page 10 : Company of Heroes (In Game Benchmark)

A child of the fall release schedule from last year, Company of Heroes has become one of the favorite Real Time Strategy games, especially for the war guys. I won't discuss how the game plays or runs because the benchmark run has nothing to do with the game play.

Now I know what you are thinking. Why would I not benchmark the actual game play? Well, the in-game benchmark is 100% repeatable by the users at home and using Fraps to measure FPS in real game play is going to give quite different results on each system as well as at home for users wanting to get a ballpark for how these cards stack up to theirs. Other games can be simply played with Fraps running in the background to give a realistic portrayal of the FPS whereas Company of Heroes can change drastically depending on what happens. So, the in-game benchmark it is until I figure out a way to get repeatable results across all platforms when benchmarking.

The Company of Heroes cut scene benchmark shows quite a bit of variation from what we have seen up to this point. There must be something onboard the HD2600 Pro that the older cards do not possess because the performance advantage the HD2600 Pro shows here is not likely to be repeated on the other games and certainly hasn't shown up in the games we have already looked at. I did run the benchmarks on all setups three times like always and the results remained the same so we will have to accept them as valid from what I can see.

Page 11 : F.E.A.R. Benchmarks

Supernatural, paranormal, and first-person shooter are all that needs to be said to sum up F.E.A.R.. Released late last year, F.E.A.R. has been crippling video cards since that time with intense realism and chilling game play straight from a Japanese horror flick. The details, the music, the action, are all inspired to keep you the player on edge and all the visuals are powered by the GPU putting a lot of stress on any video card. The normal mapping and parallax mapping give texture to otherwise two dimensional objects such as bullet holes in walls. The game is powered by DirectX 9 and features an entire host of shaders that run the Jupiter EX (Monolith's Lithtech) engine.

For the benchmarks, I have turned all options to maximum with the exception of soft shadows being turned off. I find that soft shadows can really hurt performance and but don't add enough visually to offset the performance hit. The in-game benchmark was used to get the results below. Let's have a look to see how the PowerColor HD2600 Pro fared.

To say that the X1650 Pro was out-classed wouldn't be entirely true. It did hold its own in F.E.A.R. but as the resolution was increased, frames per second quickly dropped off. All of the other cards tested had trouble holding the FPS up at higher resolutions but the game is certainly playable with high details at 1024×768 and should be no problem at 1152×864, especially with a little bit of detail manipulation.

Page 12 : Battlefield 2142 Benchmarks

The great successor to Battlefield 2, BF2142 is the third child of the 2006 fall video game release bonanza. Aren't you just excited for what is coming out this fall though? Our next benchmark has a little preview taste of what is to come. Back to BF2142 though. There isn't much else to say about this game that we all don't know. The BattleField franchise will no doubt push on creating games based on their own engine and us as gamers will no doubt gobble them up for their rich online content, reward system, and statistic tracking.

The time demo used in the benchmarking of BF2142 is from Hardware Secrets. I simply created my own resolution shortcuts to run the time demo with the options I chose fit. Detail levels were again all set to high in game and the benchmark was ran without sound to remove it from the equation and to not manipulate results.

The BF2142 benchmark results again show the HD2600 Pro playing up with the rest of the cards tested and handily beating both the X800GTO and X1650 Pro. In fact, at 1024×768, the HD2600 Pro almost keeps pace with the 7600GS. As resolution gets turned up, the frame rates drop off a little faster than the 7600GS but even at 1680×1050, the game is definitely playable with some detail level adjustments. Anti-aliasing really crushes the performance though which is almost expected since the HD2600 Pro is really at the bottom rung of the mid-range ladder.

Page 13 : Bioshock (Demo) Benchmarks

I just happened to be benchmarking all of the cards the day the Bioshock demo was released so I figured why not start Fraps and do some number checking since I was going to play it anyway, right? For those living under a rock, Bioshock is the latest "big release" from 2K Games. It is another First Person Shooter but with a bit of a twist if you will. Bioshock takes place in an art-deco underwater city known as Rapture where things have gone horribly wrong and the city has run amuck with genetically altered freaks. I won't go into any more details but I will say that the weapons available are interesting and the feel you get while playing the game is quite cool. It really takes you back to that era and the visuals have you always looking around.

As mentioned, Fraps was used to keep track of the frames per second while I was playing and I started testing from the time that we awake from injecting the first plasmid into the character. For those that have played the demo, you know what I am talking about. I then played out the rest of the demo in a similar fashion for all the cards and recorded the Fraps numbers below. Let's have a look.

The numbers on a whole are quite low but surprisingly enough, the game was quite playable at 1024×768 with all cards except the 7600GS oddly enough. The strongest card, and a relatively newer card, had a lot of trouble with Bioshock. The PowerColor HD2600 Pro excelled with this brand new game and was easily better than any others I tested. The clear absence of any scores from the X800GTO states that Bioshock is for Shader Model 3.0 cards only. I had no idea until attempting to run the game with the HIS card.

We finished up the benchmarks with a bright spot for the HD2600 Pro in the newest game which may be a sign that the features of the newer architecture need new games written for those features to show their muscle so this video card may have more tricks up its sleeves this busy fall game release season.

Page 14 : Conclusion

The landscape for mid-range graphics processors is so vast that sometimes fighting through them seems like an almost impossible task. I speak from experience having built many machines for family and friends where a video card was necessary but a high-end card was beyond overkill. The ATI/AMD HD2K series is a very nicely positioned chipset rich with features that offer plenty for a wide range of end-users. This review primarily concerned itself with 3D performance and with new games dropping light hot cakes in the coming months, rightfully so, but the HD2K series really can handle any and all situations.

The PowerColor HD2600 Pro 512MB DDR2 is a fine example of the HD2K series with all of the multimedia features like Avivo HD but also packing just enough punch to satisfy the average gamer in 3D performance. I was actually kind of surprised how well the HD2600 Pro kept up with the other cards tested, especially with the newer more demanding games. Of course, there is always something that I can nitpick on and that is the fan. It is a little bit "buzzy" and can be heard over top of a couple 120mm fans. It is not that it is loud, it just emits a pitch that is easily picked up by my ears. With such low temperatures and a small heatsink/fan used, I would think it would be fairly easy to cool this card passively and would love to see something of that nature from PowerColor.

Overall, however, the PowerColor HD2600 Pro 512MB DDR2 is a solid performer with a lot of features and a decent value for the sub $100USD price tag. If you have a low budget build on the horizon, this is one card you should definitely consider.

Advantages

• Small, and lightweight…will fit in any setup with ease

• Un-expectedly decent in 3D performance
• Fully featured with all the HD2K features present

Disadvantages

• Despite being a decent performer, high resolutions are still tough for gaming

• Fan noise is a little more than I would like, going passive would be a breeze though

Overclockers Online would like to thank PowerColor for the review opportunity.