Introduction

AMD have got their whole mid-range lineup well and truly going now and we had a look at Palit and their HD 2600 cards the other week; now it's time to have a look at the Sapphire HD 2600 XT and HD 2400 XT.

The 8600 series from NVIDIA got off to a bit of a rough start, no thanks to the somewhat hefty price tags attached to them due to cards like the 7900GS still being around. Now that the old supplies have dried up, the 8600 series seems to be the new cool card; though the HD 2600 series impressed us the other week too.

The question is though, is it enough for us to recommend them over the 8600 series? Well at the time of writing about the Palit cards, almost! Since then a new driver set has come out in the form of the Catalyst 7.8 and some serious speed increases were seen for the mid-range cards. This could be enough for them to be the card of choice for users on a budget.