Overclock3D.Net :: Print Page :: Asus 2600XT and 2600Pro

We went through the architecture changes for R600 in an earlier article, but the R630 chip keeps the ring-bus memory architecture from R600 as well, albeit scaled down to a 128mb interface.

As I said on paper the cards stack up well giving us what should be some nice numbers.

R630 vs G84

Or in laymans terms: nVidia 8600 vs ATI 2600. We'll be pitting two nVidia cards against the 2600 series to see how well they stack up.

	GeForce 8600 GTS	GeForce 8600 GT	Radeon 2600 XT	Radeon 2600 Pro
Stream Processors	32	32	120	120
Core Clock (MHz)	675	540	800	600
Shader Clock (MHz)	1450	1180	800	600
Memory Clock (MHz)	1000	700	700	500
Memory Amount	256 GDDR3	256mb GDDR3	256 GDDR3	256 GDDR2
Memory Interface	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)	32	22.4	22.4	12.8
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec)	10.8	8.6	3.2	2.4

Please note that the 8600 GTS is included for reference purposes only.

ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 Feature Summary (from AMD's website )

* 390 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process

* 128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface

* Ring Bus Memory Controller

o Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes

* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

o 120 stream processing units
+ Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
+ Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
+ Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
o 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
o Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
o Shader instruction and constant caches
o Up to 40 texture fetches per clock cycle
o Up to 128 textures per pixel
o Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
o DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
o High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
o Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
o Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
o Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
o Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
o Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
o 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
o Physics processing support

* Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0

o Shader Model 4.0
o Geometry Shaders
o Stream Output
o Integer and Bitwise Operations
o Alpha to Coverage
o Constant Buffers
o State Objects
o Texture Arrays

* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration

o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

* Anti-aliasing features

o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
o Temporal anti-aliasing
o Gamma correct
o Super AA (CrossFire configurations only)
o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

* Texture filtering features

o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
o Bicubic filtering
o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

* CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology

o Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
o Integrated compositing engine
o High performance dual channel interconnect

* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform

o Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
+ High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
o Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration
+ Motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform)
o Avivo Video Post Processor
+ Color space conversion
+ Chroma subsampling format conversion
+ Horizontal and vertical scaling
+ Gamma correction
o High Quality Video Post Processing
+ Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
+ De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
+ Detail enhancement
+ Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
+ Bad edit correction
o Two independent display controllers
+ Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
+ Full 30-bit display processing
+ Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
+ Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
+ High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
+ Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
+ Fast, glitch-free mode switching
+ Hardware cursor
o Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
+ Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
+ Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content2
o Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
+ Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15361
o HDMI output support
+ Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10801
+ Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
o Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
+ Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
+ Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
+ Underscan and overscan compensation
o MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
o Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
o VGA mode support on all display outputs

* PCI Express x16 bus interface

* OpenGL 2.0 support

Good work inside though a little room to slide around.

Package

Asus haven't put a whole load in with their 2600 XT as is usual with mid-range cards, certainly nothing on the 2900 XT package.

We have:

* "Speed Setup" manual
* CD-based manual
* Driver CD
* ATI Internal Crossfire dongle
* DVI to VGA connector
* S-Video to component cable

Hardware-wise not a bad lot of kit, but nothing to give you any High Definition viewing like DVD player software, which is a slight shame.

The Card

The card itself is a nice looking bit of kit. Coloured in red, one of my favourite PCB colours, initial impressions are good.

The card is pretty small in height and length but it is the cooler that dominates the picture here. The cooler is a Zalman-esque GPU cooler with a fairly large fan in the middle.

Side on we can see that a solid base then dissipates the heat with fins fanning out from the base.

Caps are a mixed bunch with some solid capacitors and a few high quality normal Japanese caps mixed in. This is Asus saving a little on cost, but the caps are still high quality and shouldn't give you any hassle.

Four screws attach the cooler to the PCB, although as you will see below this isn't the only fixing mechanism.

Double Dual-link DVI and a TV-out on the card complete outputs with HDCP-ready...ummm...ness :)

The Cooler

The cooler as I have said above is a pretty nicely done affair and smacks of Zalman to me (although ThermalTake and others have similar models). It's effective in getting rid of the hot stuff: with a pretty hot ambient of 23.4°C it sat at 37°C idle and topped out at 58°C load. None too shabby.

The whole affair is as quiet as I've heard on a GPU active air cooler with barely a whisper escaping at full load. Perfect for media PCs.

Now usually at this point I'd give you some money shots of some "nekkid" R630 chips and show you what kind of thermal paste has been applied. Unfortunately I simply couldn't get the cooler free of the card. The screws were undone easily enough but it wouldn't budge despite some not-so gentle persuasion. Beware of this if you want to change the cooler at some point...it won't come off. I can only assume the paste had dried on or that thermal glue was used.

Again good information on the back of the box.

Taking a look at the internals of the packaging we see the same thing again here.

Again could be a little better but should stave off most unwanted bumps and bruises from careless couriers.

Package

The package is again identical to the EAH 2600 XT.

We have:

* "Speed Setup" manual
* CD-based manual
* Driver CD
* ATI Internal Crossfire dongle
* DVI to VGA connector
* S-Video to component cable

And again I say decent hardware bundle, just missing some kind of DVD player software.

The Card

The card is almost identical to the EAH 2600 XT with the nice looking red PCB and the cooler that really looks the biz.

Less solid caps are used on this card but again all high-quality Japanese capacitors are used and the look of the card itself is decent.

Again double Dual-link DVI abounds on the card with HDCP compatible output for those of you wanting to play HD content on an HDCP TV.

The Cooler

Being a little more brief this time I can say again that the cooler is whisper quiet on the EAH 2600 Pro and looks great. Ambient at 23.5°C we have 34°C idle and 56°C load.

And also again I failed to get the cooler off of the card without actually going as far as breaking it.

Now onto my test setup.

Call of Duity sees the 2600 XT do pretty nicely with a small lead in Maximum and Average FPS. Playing Call of Duty 2 was a decent experience with the cards, although at points there was lag not FPS related. After a lot of checking and re-installing it seemed to be a driver related problem.

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is a game based on an engine that uses many features of DirectX 9.0c. It has volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax mapping and particle effects, with a slow-motion mode that really taxes today's top of the line GPU's. I played a fully updated game with the latest patches installed. I played three two-minute runs on a taxing part of the game with plenty of action, using slow-motion for the full time whilst firing at enemy soldiers and using grenades that produce a cool "blast" contortion effect when blown up.

The cards were played at 1280 x 1024 with 4 x AA, 4 x FSAA and soft shadows disabled. All other settings were on maximum.

However upon playing through F.E.A.R. the 2600's both fall well behind. It has to be said that the gaming experience whilst playing F.E.A.R. was pretty poor even at 1280 x 1024, due to inconsistant frame rates.

Oblivion

Oblivion is an awesome RPG with a simply huge immersive environment, great graphics and incredibly realistic scenery. This game is currently one of the most testing games that you can buy and it is certainly a test of the high-end cards here. I chose to do a run-through of the Arena part of the game. I spoke to a character, did some magic whilst in a fight and fought in the arena that is pretty huge. Also as well as doing this test I took a wander around to make sure that the benchmark resembled the general gameplay with each card. In-game settings used:

Oblivion was played at 1280 x 1024 with HDR enabled and no AA.

Oblivion was at odds with what we've seen in previous reviews - ATI usually stomp over the competition here but not this time. Playing the game felt pretty nice, but not as smooth as the 8600's. This was a bit of a surprise to me and left me feeling a little disappointed.