Category of small cheap notebooks became very popular and there is no wonder why most of big brands want a piece of cake for themselves. But Asus got all of them off-guard. Because of that we’ve been waiting rather long for Eee’s true rival . We’ve already mentioned MSI’s agility which allowed them again to be first with new product on market. Their trump card wears name Wind and model that InsideHW had tested is MSI Wind U100.
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The long waited AMD platform for notebooks under the name PUMA is finally introduced and InsideHW had a chance to test notebook based on this platform. To all users that have been waiting cheap integrated graphics with good performances, time has come. Intel Centrino was so far “untouchable” in field of portable computers but AMD Puma, by all appearance, got a necessary quality to fight for highest position.
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USB hard disks lately become very popular. This especially goes for 2.5’’models. The reasons for that can be found in their usefulness and practicality. Yet, we are living in times when it is necessary to transfer huge amounts of data from place to place. At first, manufacturers on market fought with larger and larger capacity of these devices. Lately, when capacity stopped being key factor, manufacturers turned to HDD case design. On that field, Prestigio went step ahead of its competitors and launched Prestigio data Safe II Fashion Edition.
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At the end of June, in Spain, we were introduced to a new series of 48xx graphics cards from ATI. We saw then only RV770PRO (4850) but at this moment 4870 (RV770XT) is also available. Even though our sources from AMD didn’t unveil why 4870 wasn’t shown on launching, we assume that some problems with quantities of available GDDR5 memory occurred. Considering that 4850 uses GDDR3 memory, it is no surprise that many retailers had them on stock. ATI 4870 will be sold, in beginning, exclusively with GDDR5 memory (this is the first graphics card that uses this memory) but AMD leaves a possibility that some innovative partner might launch later version that uses GDDR3 memory.
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It’s rare occasion to have on test, on the same month, new generation products from two big rivals (nVIDIA and ATI). This is really good news because ATI had some serious delays with R600 and that is one of reasons why it was so indifferently received on market. ATI realized that now must roll up its sleeves to catch up nVIDIA, because at that point seemed that nVIDIA unreachably moved away.
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It's common practice that, right after presenting a new product, partners start to aggressively promote the already hyped products. As expected, after the premiere and NDA expiry of the mainstream-segment AMD graphics cards, manufacturers began to offer their “hopefuls” on the market. The first such sample to reach us was a PowerColor card. The model at hand was an HD 2600XT with 256 MB of DDR3 memory. Visually, the card is quite different compared to the DDR4 memory version.
The box in which the card arrived was completely white, with no print whatsoever, which clearly states that this is a test sample. All we could find inside were the card and the newest “beta” drivers. Still, we used the latest publicly available Catalyst 7.6 drivers for comparison. The PCB of the graphics card turned out to be significantly smaller than the one with the GDDR4 chips onboard. This PowerColor HD 2600XT also has a couple of CrossFire tabs on the upper side, so you can easily pair a couple of these cards up.
The production is top-quality, spirals are “armoured”, and the card is dominated by the large active cooler which irresistibly reminds us of Zalman models. It does its job perfectly, and the GPU temperature does not rise over 37 degrees in idle mode and 60 degrees in full load mode. Also, the card does not possess additional power connectors (i.e. is fully supplied with power form the PCI-Express port), which is also praiseworthy, since the overall power consumption is rather small.
Graphics Card
PowerColor Radeon HD 2600XT
GPU
RV630
Manufacturing (nm)
65
Stream Processors
120
ROPs
4
Texture Units
8
GPU Frequency (MHz)
800
Memory Frequency (MHz)
1400
Memory Size (MB)
256
Memory / Access Time (ns)
DDR3 / 1.4
Memory Bus (bit)
128
Memory Bandwidth (GB/s)
22.4
The card's fan is completely inaudible even at maximum RPM, but occupies the neighbouring slot, which might be a drawback for some. The GPU used herein is a RV630 which possesses 120 stream processors, grouped in 5 units, while the ROP number is 8. What spoils the final impression with AMD's mainstream cards is a small number of TMUs. Their number is only 4, and we consider it a major bottleneck. This can be surpassed to a certain extent by optimising the drivers, so we can probably expect a jumpy performance rise with new driver versions. This small card has 2 DVI outputs and 1 S-Video, and we got no DVI-to-HDMI converter with this card, but we believe that it will be bundled when the card hits the market, as it is the manufacturer's call.
Speaking about that converter, as it is not a simple one, be careful not to lose it, as they are not freely available on the market at the moment. As far as video reproduction is concerned, all is as promised and expected – perfect. The card has a UVD technology which decreases processor usage. Alongside that, these cards have two HDCP keys, in order to enable 1080p video material reproduction. The RV630 which is situated on this PowerColor Radeon HD 2600 XT is the A15 revision and works at 1.2 V. The GPU clock is 800 MHz, just like the stronger model, whereas memory operates at a lower clock. Although an entire 800 MHz slower, it works at 1400 MHz. It was demonstrated that the difference in performance is not proportional.
What's more, this card performed fantastically compared to its elder brother. If the information we have is correct, i.e. that this card will be in the 100 € price range, it would certainly be a pleasant surprise. The memory manufacturer is Hynix, and the chips have a response time of 1.4 ns and are passively cooled. We are quite confident that the cooler does most of the work, as the air which flows through the fins carries away all of the heat.
When its price is taken into consideration, this product is of excellent performance. The difference between this and the DDR4 memory model are not as huge as the clock difference. When the very small PCB is considered, together with small power consumption, we have to admit that this is a very well measured, accessible and high-quality product. All we can say is that we are sorry not to have had two of these, so that we can try them in CrossFire, because we strongly believe that it would be a fantastic solution within the 200 € price range.
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