 Gigabyte Radeon HD 2600XT Silentpipe II
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 07 Nov 2007
Silent graphics cards have always had a special, but limited market space. If we disregard the low-end segment, which has passive coolers because they are cheap and they don't need active cooling, we are still left with a bunch of models that are present today, going all the way up to the very top of the mainstream segment, performance wise. Gigabyte HD 2600XT Silentpipe II is such a card.
The card is based on a RV630 GPU, which has 120 stream processors and operates at 800 MHz. That is almost 3 times less than the next card in ATI?s DX10 lineup, the 2900XT, which has 320 SPs. This situation is about to change with the soon to be introduced DX10.1 compatible cards based on RV670 GPU. The 2600XT has a 128 bit memory bus, which is a standard with all other mainstream cards, and 256 MB of GDDR3 memory (not to be confused with DDR3 memory that is now coming as a standard for system memory), operating at 700MHz. The main difference when compared to a standard 2600XT card is the blue PCB with Gigabyte?s logo, and a silent heatsink which has a heatpipe going in two directions from the copper base that?s positioned on the GPU. The heatsink is actually larger than the card, so it goes over the PCB on the top and back sides of the card. We will be covering its cooling capabilities later in this review.
Unlike some other 2600XT card we have seen, this one has two Crossfire connectors, although the primary use of the card is not gaming, but rather use in a silent Home Theatre PC, for which it is ideally suited since it supports full H.264 and VC-1 decoding used in HD video material.
The card comes with two DVI-I->D-Sub adapters, one Crossfire bridge and a video out dongle. The package also includes a full version of Neverwinter Nights 2, which is a policy we do not support, since it inevitably raises the price of the card, and most buyers like to choose their own games to play.
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