Verdict: Even after seven months of price cutting the HD 2600 XT isn't worth buying.

The HD 2600 was ATI's scaled-down version of the HD 2900 GPU, which was based on the Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360. There are several versions of the basic HD 2600, and this is the top-end model.

As one of ATI's first DirectX 10-compatible unified shader GPUs, the HD 2600 XT has an impressive 120 stream processors. However, each of these is less powerful than an Nvidia stream processor, so it isn't a good idea to compare this number with the 32 stream processors of the similarly priced GeForce 8600 GTS. In addition, unlike an Nvidia GPU, the stream processors in the HD 2600 XT run at the same frequency as the rest of the GPU (in this case, 800MHz). However, the real Achilles heel of the HD 2600 XT is its tiny bank of four ROPs, which means that the GPU struggles to output data quickly, regardless of its raw processing power. This particular version of the HD 2600 XT is accompanied by 256MB of GDDR4 clocked at 1.1GHz (2.2GHz effective), connected via a 128-bit memory controller.

The GDDR4-equipped version of the HD 2600 XT proved to be the fastest of the three HD 2600 XTs in this Labs test, but due to its tiny number of ROPs, it's painfully slow. For example, it was only able to deliver a smooth frame rate in Call of Duty 4 and Need for Speed: Pro Street at 1,024 x 768. As for Crysis, you can forget about playing this game at high detail settings - the HD 2600 XT jerked along at 10fps, which is far too slow to be able to pan around smoothly, let alone aim accurately.

Although the price of the HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR4 has fallen way below the £100 mark, it isn't worth considering, as it struggles to play modern games. Unfortunately, if you want to play the latest games at high detail settings, you really need to spend at least £100 on a new graphics card.

• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008
• CPUs - 21st December 2007
• Motherboards - 13th November 2007

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