ATI 2600/2400 (Desktop) Comparison and Benchmarks

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/ATI_Radeon_HD_2600_and_2400_Performance/?page=1

http://news.firingsquad.com/hardware/radeon_hd_2600_performance_preview/default.asp

(I am comparing gt to xt not gts since the xt is designed to take on the gt)
Well its the results are in and am I surprised not a bit? Basically the 8600gt churns out 4-14 more fps depending on the game but overall is on par. Whats disappointing interesting is the radeons do not appear to be highly overclockable which the first article reported gains of up to 9%. Even more interesting is the similar argument between 3dmark and in game performance that has been sprouting up everywhere. When the 2600 wins in 3dmarks it seems it wins by a significant margin while when the 8600 wins it wins by a decent or minimal margin but yet the 8600 wins outright in fps and in game performance. But wait it doesn't? In some games yes it does but in certain games it gets smoked by the 2600 such as company of heroes when there is a significant fps margin rather then 2-5 fps quibbles. Overall though it seems the 8600 beats it in performance.

My conclusion: I've been saying it for months this comes up to be a draw overall, with minor differences but one I think optimized drivers come out for both cards the differences will be minimal. What makes me prefer the 8600 though is that it seems much more overclockable. Also the 65nm die shrink you would expect a good amount less of power consumption especially since that was all ATI was raving about (which I figured was their backup in case they lost in performance) it does not even shatter the performance which ATI was hyping about especially since it is performing lower and the power consumption difference is even smaller in idle mode. But I am not a nvidia fan boy just a disappointed consumer and still have confidence that overtime driver optimization like i said will make the performance differences negligible making the lower energy consumption more pronounced. I want ATI and AMD (same company yes I know) for that matter to catch up to the lead that nvidia and intel have set. Better and equal competition is better for us the consumer, its like that commercial "When banks compete you win" which in our case is "When enormous technologically innovative companies compete you win."

But since this is a notebook forum how does this translate to us? The mobile versions of these cards are right around the corner but apparently so is the 8800m series and if it is indeed mxmII and able to be put into 15.4 inch laptops (Soon to be Asus C90 owner ) along with 17 inches ATI has found itself in a hole again yet while the 8700 was announced most people (on this forum at least) find it a dissapointment. With the 8800m die shrink and supposed 22 watt consumption once it comes out it will put the mobility 2600 to shame. So exciting stuff but I guess just with all things (like my c90s) we will have to wait.........and wait......COME TO ME C90!

 

Here You can find some more real, in-game HD 2600/HD 2400 benchmarks. They're unfortunately Polish-only, but the numbers speak for themselves i think ;-) Test setup is on page 4, testing spans from 4 to 11, on page 12 we have the power consumption and on 13 - the overclocking...

The test showcases a disturbing drop of HDs performance when AA/AF is enabled and also compares both cards with 8600 GTS...

Oh... and just by the way... the title of the article is "Everyone can castrate..."

 

LOl why is it titled that?

 

The GTS seems to be the most consistent out of the cards they have reviewed in that Polish article. It's odd that the 2600 drops on AA and AF, I thought they were better than Nvidia at that?

 

Propably it came out of frustration with performance of all those crippled midrange DX10 cards... both from nVidia and AMD :-/

 

Personally I dont see why people are downplaying the 8600m gt power so much. Sure it didn't shatter the old gpus performance but it is still powerful. The overclocking on this thing is crazy. Stock it performs about on par as 7900gs and overclocking brings it damn well close to 7900 gtx standards to me thats still good though not great but again thats all attributed the 128 bit. Again these are still premature drivers, no official full directx10 has game even come out it (I hardly count lost planet and the COH dx10 patch a dx10 ground up game such as crysis is). So if after overclocking and optimised drivers come out and my 8600m reaches 7900gtx standards consider me a happy camper.

 

Beacause much of their power lies wasted?

 

Why should you get those video cards? Those are weak compared to the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT.

In fact, the 2900 XT has 102 FPS on Company of heroes. It out performed the 8800GTX on most of the DX 10 games. ( I read it from a magazine, I will post the comparisons if you wish)

 

wow those were awful scores. They were unable to play the latest games at 1280x1024 at a stable framerate (30+).

Im kind of glad i'm skipping this round of cards altogether. Im a midrange buyer and these disappoint beyond belief.

 

Yikes, this is somewhat disappointing.

I'm still waiting for the Mobility X2600 benchmarks...I'm curious to see how it stacks up against the Go 8600.

 

Bleh.

Guess performance for the Mobility HD 2600XT *might* be on par with the 8600GT, but it's definately not going to be better (which I kind of hoped).

Anyway, since this was brought up by OP and is asked over and over again: No, don't even think about getting an 8800M which may or may not be released in anything smaller than 17''. Never going to happen, 15,4'' notebooks run hot as it is with 8600M. Seems like even the 8700M GT is targeted at 17'' and above.

 

Currently the 8600GT (Desktop) consumes 75W and the HD2600XT consumes 45W. We have no idea how much W the HD 2600XT mobility will consumes.

 

If it so, then we might see a mobility hd 2600xt tat is on par with it's desktop counterpart.

 

Dont know where you got those numbers but the gt is around 43 tdp while the gts is around 71. The hd2600xt is 45 tdp though yes. Nonetheless the hd2600 because of its die shrink is more energy efficient and does use less watts but not a significant amount.

 

"Before we bring this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter and also took some notes regarding its noise output as reported by our digital sound level meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used and to explain how loud the configurations were under load. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the video cards alone."


Hothardware

FiringSquad

The result is kinda mixed...

 

From PCLab.pl - Power consumption in Watts...

Idle:


Stress:


The test setup was: Core 2 Extreme X6800 (+Scythe Infinity), Intel D975XBX, 2 GB DDR2 800 MDT (5-5-5-12), Barracuda 7200.8 400 GB

:EDIT: Another Review, this time by Anandtech...

 

Actually, the Radeon HD 2900 XT outperfoms the 8800GTS

 

The performance of the R600 series is largely dependent on drivers due to it's VLIW architecture. In theory, the advantage is that R600 performance will continue to grow as it ages as improvements to software compiling is improved. Or it'll turn out like the GeForceFX, which was also VLIW and did improve quite a bit with drivers, but ended up running into other architectural issues, limiting it's performance. Chief among the R600's limitations is inadequate texture computing power, something that plagued the R5xx series, and ATI still hasn't learned from.

In any case, both nVidia and ATI's mid-range offerings are disappointing this generation. Whether it's some conspiracy to force people to buy higher end products or just architecture improving faster than process technology, I definitely hope the fall refresh brings something worthwhile.

 

Eh still think the new mobile chips aren't bad as people are saying. Comparing the power consumption/ performance of the 7series the 8s are pretty impressive.