ATI Hits With Mainstream DX10 - HD 2600 XT - HD 2600 XT - Specs, Overclocking and More

Tuesday, 26 June 2007 21:52 Last Updated on Saturday, 19 April 2008 16:43 Written by Benjamin "Zeus" Heide

Article Index
ATI Hits With Mainstream DX10 - HD 2600 XT
HD 2600 XT - Specs, Overclocking and More
HD 2600 XT - Test System and Benchmarks
HD 2600 XT - DX10 Game Benchmarks
HD 2600 XT - HD Video and Conclusion

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Card Specs & Overclocking:

The RV630 Core is based on the 0.065 micron process. This is a much more efficient process than the older 0.08 micron that was quite "leaky" on the HD 2900 XT. In our earlier tests with this card, it runs between 36C - 40C idle and into the low-mid 60's when running fully loaded. The single slot cooler is quiet and the card is not audible over the rest of our test system.

GPU - RV630 - 0.065 Micron
390 Million Transistors
120 Vertex Shaders - Vertex Ver. 4.0
8 Textures / Clock
120 Pixel Shader Engines - PS Ver. 4.0
Core Speed - 800MHz
Memory Speed - 1100MHz
Fill Rate - 6400 MTexels / sec
Memory Bandwidth - 35.2GB / sec

The memory is Samsung K4U52324QE-BC09 memory that runs on a limited 128-bit memory interface. There is 256MB of this GDDR4 that powers the card at an impressive 1100MHz DDR. More information about the actual memory modules chips is below.

The K4U52324QE is 536,870,912 bits of hyper synchronous data rate Dynamic RAM organized as 8 x 2,097,152 words by 32 bits, fabricated with SAMSUNG's high performance CMOS technology. Synchronous features with Data Strobe allow extremely high performance up to 11.2GB/s/chip.

1.8V± 0.09V power supply for device operation

1.8V± 0.09V power supply for I/O interface

On-Die Termination (ODT)

Output Driver Strength adjustment by EMRS

Calibrated output drive

1.8V Pseudo Open drain compatible inputs/outputs

8 internal banks for concurrent operation

Differential clock inputs (CK and /CK)

Commands entered on each positive CK edge

Double pumping address

CAS latency : 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 (clock)

Burst length : 8 only

Full specs and card info can be found at ATI here.

The RV630 is said to consume 40-45W and overclocking is very limited in the Catalyst "Overdrive" settings. We have experimented with several different Catalyst revisions and have been using the new Catalyst 7.6 drivers for the past week. These drives fixed a few graphic issues we were having and had actual overclocking options in the Control Center. We tried the latest ATI Tool, and ATI Tray Tools, but those just crashed our system.

Catalyst 7.6

Overdrive

ATi limits the Overdrive settings to 857MHz core speed and 1179MHz (2.36GHz) memory speed. While these may not seem like much, our sample was only able to run 100% stable at 855Mhz / 1175MHz. If we tried to run at the maximum settings provided, we ran into some benchmark crashing. The core ended up being ramped up just less than 7%, and the memory clocked accordingly with just under a 7% gain. Real world results shouldn't show much of an improvement. We're not that excited. We expected more from this card, and perhaps withan additional power connection, we could squeeze out more performance. We also have to keep in mind that this is a sample card. Regular retail cards may be entirely different in terms of overclocking potential.

HD 2600 XT Laid Bare:

This next section will just show you closer views of the card and how it's laid out. We've taken pictures of most of the interesting features of this unit and you can click any of the thumbnails below for a full-sized image.