ASUS Radeon HD 2600PRO Preview

The ASUS EAH2600PRO doesn't closely follow the reference design for the Radeon HD 2600PRO but in fact uses a much larger heatsink. ASUS makes a very bold claim that the EAH2600PRO will overate 20°C cooler than the reference heatsink. Though without the new Linux driver we won't be testing the claim in this article. This ASUS Gaming Series heatsink is made of copper and uses a moderately sized fan. The DDR2 video memory is manufactured by Qimonda with a part number of HYB18T256161BF-20. In total there are eight memory chips with four on each side of the PCB. The ASUS EAH2600PRO runs at the HD 2600PRO reference frequencies of 600MHz for the R600 core and 1000MHz for the memory (2 x 500MHz DDR2).

The Radeon HD 2600PRO is powered completely by the PCI Express slot and requires no 6-pin or 8-pin PCI-E power connector. On the backside of the PCB are four screw holes, which is how the ASUS heatsink is mounted against the GPU. The HD 2600PRO has two dual-link DVI ports and a TV-Out connector. The ASUS EAH2600PRO 256MB is not a CrossFire edition graphics card, which should not present any problems for Linux users due to the lack of CrossFire driver support.

As the new ATI/AMD Linux driver is not yet publicly available, we are not delivering the performance results in this article. However, the ASUS EAH2600PRO 256MB graphics card will be used in our launch day testing upon the new Linux driver being introduced later this year. The ASUS EAH2600PRO looks to be an excellent midrange PCI Express graphics card that will only set you back a quarter of the cost of a brand new Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB graphics card. The EAH2600PRO also features a heatsink fan that operates very quietly while offering excellent cooling capabilities. The Radeon HD 2000 Linux support is coming soon, so stay tuned and be sure to stop by the Phoronix Forums.