Verdict: Too slow to cope with the latest games.

If you thought that the GDDR4-equipped version of the HD 2600 XT was cheap, you should be astounded by its little brother, which is equipped with even cheaper GDDR3 memory.

Both cards have exactly the same GPU, which has 120 stream processors clocked at 800MHz. Despite having a large number of stream processors for a mid-range card, the GPU has only four ROPs, so it struggles to output data quickly.

To keep the price low, this version of the HD 2600 XT is fitted with 256MB of GDDR3, which is far cheaper than GDDR4. However, GDDR3 can't run at as high a frequency as GDDR4, and on the GDDR3-equipped HD 2600 XT, it runs at 700MHz (1.4GHz effective), compared to 1.1GHz (2.2GHz effective) for the GDDR4 HD 2600 XT. Both cards have the same 128-bit memory controller, which means that the GDDR3 version of the HD 2600 XT has far less memory bandwidth (22.4GB/sec as opposed to 35.2GB/sec).

Memory bandwidth is particularly important when running games at high resolutions with lots of anti-aliasing. As a result, the GDDR3-equipped HD 2600 XT proved to be slightly slower than the GDDR4 version. However, the difference wasn't noticeable, as the GPU struggles with the complex pixel calculations required by modern graphics engines.

The GDDR3-equipped HD 2600 XT could only play Need for Speed: Pro Street smoothly at 1,024 x 768. Meanwhile, Call of Duty 4 proved to be a little on the slow side, while Crysis was well beyond the card's meagre capabilities.

It should come as no surprise that a £64 graphics card isn't suited to playing the latest games at high detail settings. However, it's disappointing when you consider that £64 could buy you a highly overclockable dual-core CPU that's capable of running all the latest games and applications.

• 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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