Radeon HD 2600 XT Reference Board Examination
The PCB for HD 2600 XT is a little shy of HD 2900 XT in terms of length, but it's the same size in the other dimension. The biggest changes come with the cooler and board power provision, what with HD 2600 XT being single slot and not in need of external power. The SKU, even at 800MHz on the GPU, doesn't ever ask for more than the 75W the x16 PCI Express it connects through can provide. In fact, it's not even likely to get close, such is the variance in slot power provision that you can get from one mainboard to the next.
That maps to the requirement for a single-slot cooler rather than the double-wide version you might have seen on other RV630 board pics around the web. Even if it wasted all that input power as heat while working, the substantial copper mass of the cooler assembly will do the job of heat removal just fine. The fan pulls air in through its opening and pushes it across the copper mass and out towards the backplane.
It gets too noisy to recommend at full speed, but it's definitely thermostatically controlled and eager to change its speed in gradual steps rather than big ones. So at boot you'll hear it spin at max RPMs for a short time, before the on-chip diode takes a reading and feeds that in to the fan controller adjusting speed for temperature control. That happens constantly and outside of any driver control (although the driver can interfere with the default scheme), and we didn't hear full speed at any point during game or video testing.
Display output options are at their fullest on the reference hardware, as far as RV630 can provide. The DVI ports are both dual-link and both support the active DVI-to-HDMI dongle that AIB partners should hopefully provide in the box when you pick one up. Analogue output is served by a port that'll happily accept a component cable for high-def TV support, and the lesser analogue connection options are supported from that port too.
Clocks of 800MHz on the GPU and 800MHz for the four GDDR3 DRAM devices mean aggregate rates and bandwidths of 3200Mpixels/sec out of the ROPs (just one quad of them remember) for finished pixels, 26GB/sec chip-to-DRAM bandwidth, 800Mtris/sec and, with 120 scalar ALUs, a peak instruction rate of 96Ginst/sec.
There are a pair of internal Crossfire links should you fancy a pair to accelerate your 3D rendering in a compatible mainboard, and you can see the quad of spots on the back of the PCB should a board partner want to offer an RV630 board with 512MiB of memory across two banks, using the miracle of chip select. It's standard mid-range stuff, and while the board size is some way bigger than what you'll find on something like GeForce 8600 GTS, does anyone really look at HD 2600 XT and wish it was a bit smaller?
