Product Reviews

If your PC doesn't have a PCI-E graphics card slot, the choice of new AGP cards is limited. Sapphire's new HD 2600 Pro is based around ATI's Radeon processor of the same name and has an AGP 8x interface.

The card has similar specifications to a PCI-E HD 2600 Pro, with a core clock speed of 600MHz and an effective memory speed of 1GHz. It comes with 512MB of DDR2 RAM, which allows it to handle high-quality textures such as those in our punishing Call of Duty 2 test.

There are DVI and D-sub outputs, plus a TV-out connector that can be used with the adaptors for component,

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S-video or composite video. You also get a DVI-to-D-sub adaptor. The card needs a floppy drive-style power connection from your PC's power supply.

There are some limitations. There's no HDMI output and, while you can buy a DVI-to-HDMI adaptor, no audio will be transmitted. There's also no current support for DirectX 10. AMD has said it will introduce this via a driver update in the near future. For now, this is in effect a DirectX 9 card. The card has ATI's Unified Video Decoder, which might appeal to anyone wishing to take the load off their processor when decoding HD video, such as H.264. Other bonuses if video is a priority are Avivo HD (to enhance video quality) and a near-silent cooling fan.

Gaming performance isn't fantastic. The HD 2600 Pro managed only 13.8fps in Call of Duty 2 and 18.2fps in Prey. In 3DMark06, it scored 2,957. To obtain a playable frame rate of 27fps in Call of Duty 2, we had to turn off anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

This is a good choice if you want to watch HD video on a media centre PC, but gamers are better off choosing Sapphire's AGP Radeon X1950 Pro, which is faster and costs just £30 more.