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Very Affordable ATI card from Powercolor, the Radeon HD 2400XT

Videocards/VGA Reviews by geoffrey @ 2007-07-23

Shortly after releasing their long waited HD 2900 XT, ATI announced a new generation of mid-range and low-end graphic accelerators, the HD 2600 and HD 2400 series. The HD 2600 series follow up the X1600 and are ATI´s next best mid-range product while the HD 2400 series are meant for the entry level gamers among us. We take a look at Powercolor´s HD 2400 XT, the fastest in ATI´s HD2400 line-up, to find out what kind of graphic details can be expected with this low cost video card.

Introduction

Powercolor, established by Tul Corporation in 1997, is a graphics industry leading brand name now and well known for its outstanding performance and innovative technology. In the past we've seen multiple NVIDIA and ATI based graphic accelerators made by Powercolor and besides their graphics business they've also build up some experience in the main board market. However, over the past years most of their focus has been set on vga cards build around ATI gpu's, a business which most people will recognize the Powercolor branding from. Our review subject of that is a brand new Powercolor HD 2400 XT, a pre-launch sample packed in a boring white box, the final package will look something like this:

Madshrimps (c)

The HD 2400 series are ATI's latest entry level graphics accelerators meant for people who can live with less detailed in-game and prefer the price as low as possible. Therefore ATI designed a new GPU called the R610, a shrink-down version of the high-end R600, its main features are:

Hardware based H.264/VC-1 decoding of Blu-ray™ and HD DVDs

HDMI with 5.1 surround sound audio

DirectX® 10 support

Up to twice the performance of integrated graphics


	HD 2400XT 256MB GDDR3	HD 2400PRO 256MB	HD 2400PRO 128MB
Graphics engine	Radeon HD 2400 XT	Radeon HD 2400 PRO	Radeon HD 2400 Pro
GPU	R610	R610	R610
Memory	256 MB GDDR3	256 MB DDR2	128 MB DDR2
Engine clock	700 MHz	525 MHz	525 MHz
Memory clock	700 MHz DDR (x2)	400 MHz DDR (x2)	400 MHz DDR (x2)
Memory Interface	64 bit	64 bit	64 bit

That's a quite complete feature set for such a low-end component, combined with the higher clocks of the XT version we hope ATI will provide us with decent gaming performance. Before we dive any deeper into our charts we're going to have a closer look at Powercolor's HD 2400 XT ->

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/23

Noteworthy for the HDTV fans:

We have already explored Silicon Optix HD HQV in detail. The tests and what we are looking for in them have not changed since our first round. Fortunately, the ability of NVIDIA and AMD hardware to actually perform the tasks required of HD HQV has changed quite a bit.

Both AMD and NVIDIA told us to expect scores of 100 out of 100 using their latest drivers and hardware. We spent quite a bit of time and effort in fully evaluating this test. We feel that we have judged the performance of these solutions fairly and accurately despite the fact that some subjectivity is involved. Here's what we've come up with.

The bottom line is that NVIDIA comes out on top in terms of quality. We've seen arguments for scoring these cards differently, but we feel that this is the most accurate representation of the capabilities offered by each camp.

On the low end, both AMD and NVIDIA hardware begin to stumble in terms of quality. The HD 2400 XT posts quite a lack luster performance, failing in noise reduction and HD deinterlacing (jaggies). But at least it poorly deinterlaces video at full resolution. We excluded tests of NVIDIA's 8500 series, as their video drivers have not yet been optimized for their low end hardware. Even so, we have been given indications not to expect the level of performance we see from the 8600 series. We would guess that the 8500 series will perform on par with the AMD HD 2400 series, though we will really have to wait and see when NVIDIA releases a driver for this.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3047&p=3

Comment from Gamer @ 2007/07/23

Nice review, complete and very good !!
Got some trouble with this though :

Quote:

At 46,7 dBA we can't say that this card is one of the most silent VGA cards I ever tested

Quote:

- Noisy

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/23

"bij 46.7dBa kunnen we niet zeggen dat dit een van de meest stille VGA kaarten was dat we al getest hebben"

we can't say.

Comment from Gamer @ 2007/07/23

Great, just great

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/23

que?

I clarified the sentence a bit, no more confusion now

Comment from Gamer @ 2007/07/23

I guess I need some spectacles, that's it

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