Gigabyte Radeon HD 2600XT Silentpipe II - Testing, setup
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 07 Nov 2007

To benchmark the card we assembled our standard testbed:

- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
- EVGA 680i SLI
- OCZ PC2-8000 Platinum XTC @ 800 MHz 4-4-4-12
- Western Digital RaptorX 150GB
- PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 1KW-SR
- HP LP3065 display

As with all passive cards, there?s always a danger of overheating, because even with a large heatsink there has to be some airflow in the case, other than that generated by the elevation of hot air. A case with an active CPU cooler and a 12 cm PSU fan should be enough to keep this card sufficiently cool, which is below 80 degrees Celsius, a temperature easily exceeded on our testbed with no airflow over the fins.

We benchmarked the card using 0xAA 0xAF and 4xAA 4xAF settings, since anything more just slows the FPS to one digit numbers.