Early Thoughts

Our initial thoughts center on the cooler's effectiveness in most case layouts, and the price premium over current Radeon HD 2600 XTs. While the card's not on sale and Sapphire haven't replied with the likely RRP, it's likely to be around $15-30 more than a regular HD 2600 XT at the same clocks.

For that likely premium to make sense, you're going to have to match it up with a particular chassis with a more unconventional cooling implementation than the standard ATX and BTX front-to-back flow. The fin orientation sadly makes that so, and our early temperature testing doesn't bode well for the final conclusion.

Out on an open test bench stability during game was fine, but enclosed in a chassis with front-to-back flow and ~35°C ambient temperatures, we experienced a couple of driver resets and probed temperatures in the high 80°Cs with direct fin contact, suggesting GPU temperature north of that. We couldn't get the Catalyst 7.7 driver to report GPU temperature properly -- the value wouldn't move from the reported 78°C no matter the load.

HD-DVD playback performance under Vista x86 was good, and even better than when we tested last time, which is down to a driver improvement implemented after the sample_vista_8.38.9.1-rc2_48912 release we used before.

So there's some promise for the Sapphire Ultimate Radeon HD 2600 XT to fulfil in our complete testing (we'll pit it against the 800/800-clocked GDDR3 reference board), but also some food for thought depending on how you'd integrate it.