ATI HD2600XT Performance Preview
June 28, 2007 by admin · Leave a Comment
Many of you are probably asking yourselves: why in the world is Hardwarecanucks calling this a “preview” instead of a “review”. The answer is a long one but I will try to keep it short and sweet without loosing anyone’s attention.
First and foremost I believe that it does a grave injustice to both the readers and AMD to conduct a full review of a graphics card that has not even been released to market yet. As you will see, the sample Hardwarecanucks (and probably many other reviews sites as well) has is an Engineering sample that was released over two months ago. Retail samples of the HD2600XT are harder to find than a hair in a haystack and indeed our contacts tell us that the vast majority of retailers are not even close to receiving their stock yet.
In addition to this, AMD has been working long and hard to bring us new driver revisions on a nearly daily basis. This not only shows that they want this product to succeed but that they are able to significantly increase performance through the use of driver revisions. Unfortunately, even the latest drivers we received were still Beta in nature and are not what will be shipped with the final product. For semi-proper testing purposes, I held off as long as possible doing this review so it could be done with the latest beta drivers.
So, here we have an Engineering sample of the HD2600XT coupled with beta drivers. How in the world are we (or any other review site for that matter) supposed to conduct an accurate review? Well, we can’t and therefore we won’t. Rather, what you will see below is a description of the card in addition to a few benchmarks conducted with the latest beta drivers we received.
This preview will be followed up with a full review of the HD2600XT and HD2600PRO as soon as we get actual retail samples.
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