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ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT (AGP-SERIES)

Oniisan

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Edit: Made a mistake in title, it's the 2600, not 6600.
My personal review.

3/10

This video card was a disaster. To start things off, the video card would not take the drivers from the CD, itself. Had to locate these drivers off of the Manufacturer's website (which was not ATI, it was some other brand. I took this card back, so I don't remember).

After going through the process of locating the drivers, I had to reboot, normal right? Well unfortunately, all of my BIOS, and checksums were pixelated. After getting back into Windows Vista (yes, the card did say Windows-Vista Compatible), everything was fine (except now Windows was having a rundll error, always fun). Watching movies, I did actually see a performance increase. Amazing quality. When it came to games, is the part that really made me go crazy.

Games Tested:
Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Counter-Strike: Source, Gary's Mod 10, Zombie Rising (HL2 MOD), Portal, Air Rivals, Jedi Outcast 2, Dark Age of Camelot - Catacombs / Labyrinth, and World of Warcraft.

ALL of these games would send both monitors black, and freeze the system withing 10 minutes of playing. I actually tested Counter-Strike: Source first, and the first time this happened, within the first minute of my black-out, the system recovered. It just closed my game, and that was that. It only recovered once. After about a day of this non-sense, I returned the card, because ATI was just giving me generic solutions via phone and email, and the ATI Out-sourced Manufacturer of the card I had purchased's forums were saying there was no fix for this (XP, or Vista), I gave up.

If you're looking for a 512MB AGP Video Card, go nVidia.

nVidia GeForce 7300 GT > ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

Thanks for reading!
 
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A single instance shouldn't determine whether or not a whole line of video cards is bad (at least not for the general public, anyway). Too bad to see that it didn't work out for ya :)
 
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A single instance shouldn't determine whether or not a whole line of video cards are bad (at least not for the general public, anyway). Too bad to see that it didn't work out for ya :)

+1

I :love: my pcie 2600XT
 

Oniisan

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People, please read the entire post. As i said, their forums even stated it wasn't Vista-Ready, no matter what the box said.

Here, I dug up the link. [LINK]

It's not just a single instance, and it's not a flame towards ATI, it's a flame towards VisionTek who released an unlicensed VC (yes, this means ATI does not condone this video card). The fact is , there are 2 2600's. PCI-E && AGP. The PCI-E one seems to work fine, according to their forums, it's the AGP one I'm reviewing.
 
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Can some admin please come in and tidy up this thread?

Some new guy comes on and makes a typo and the world is already at war :wtf:

How about a mod goes and edits the title and fixes the mix up. That would be constructive!
 
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You should try doing some research into what drivers work the best for that card. I would never install old drivers off the disk that came with a card. I go right to AMD/ATi or Nvidia.
 
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Can some admin please come in and tidy up this thread?

Some new guy comes on and makes a typo and the world is already at war :wtf:

How about a mod goes and edits the title and fixes the mix up. That would be constructive!

No kidding. It was done while you were typing this post.
 

Oniisan

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You should try doing some research into what drivers work the best for that card. I would never install old drivers off the disk that came with a card. I go right to AMD/ATi or Nvidia.

Please re-read the post... again. As I said, the drivers from the CD would not take, and had to update from the site anyway.

Edit:
And the drivers for this card were not on ATI's site, whether or not the ATI logo was on the box.
 
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Please re-read the post... again. As I said, the drivers from the CD would not take, and had to update from the site anyway.

Yes, I READ THAT!
 
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OMG, I'm staying out of this one.... LOL. C u later
 
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Wow, what's up with ATi's partners? First the 3850/3870 fiasco and now this? Shame on them :shadedshu:
 
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its cause its AGP and AMD did not commit to AGP varients of there HD2xxx or 3xxx lines.
 
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This whole issue is a sore point with me, and the reason why I've completely stopped recommending ATI stuff to my clients. A friend asked me to recommend a good AGP card for his older spare computer. He's not really into gaming, but he does watch DVDs on the thing occasionally. I had him order a Diamond MM HD2600Pro. All he got was grief after spending $145. The drivers were non-existent, on their site as well as the cd. What's more insulting, was the fact that the driver which was released afterward, still did not have support. The card now resides in his junk drawer, having never been used after the "no compatible hardware" message.
 

GLD

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IMO, the money spent on a "good" agp video card nowadays is better spent upgrading to a current gen. rig. It's 2008 people.
 
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IMO, the money spent on a "good" agp video card nowadays is better spent upgrading to a current gen. rig. It's 2008 people.

Did ya' bother readin' the part above, where I said he was NOT a 'gamer' and this was his SPARE computer? The computer is extremely fast for the task he currently uses it for. His main system is PCI-E, and has all the 'bells and whistles'.
 
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Luc Denissen

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Ah3650 Agp

I just bought a Asus AH3650 whit AGP interface, but the drivers from the cd doens't work very well and because it is an AGP card I cannot install the official drivers.:banghead: Now almost every 3d App. crashes immediately after i launched it because it get to 100% cpu and
in atitool I get this very strange pattern, can anybody help me whit this problem?:confused:

Thanks

 
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At least with Visiontek's 2600 pro you can force the official PCIe drivers from ATI's site in XP and it will work, but you can't install the catylist control center if you try to do that. So its a tradeoff. Compatibility is good and the card works fine with every game I tried after doing this, you just don't have any of ATI's control settings. Since the whole driver batch does install it seems to work for every application I've tried (from various years 3Dmark05, Quake 2 & 3, Crysis, Medal of Honor and a couple of other games which I forget).

My advice, if you're having difficulties and want the newest driver, force the install of ATI's newest drivers from their site for the PCIe version, at worst it won't work, then you just go back and uninstall it, if it works with your card the card will work, very well, but without the control center.

To do the force install, you don't use the installer utility, you put the files into a folder, then do the manually select driver deal, have disk, point to the folder bit.
 

Luc Denissen

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Thanks a lot, it works much better now. It still craches some times, but I can play some games now and still use the Asus ccc from the cd. Now I only need to get the drivers for the hdmi audio working.
 

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Same experience.

I still have a pretty decent pc from the AGP era which I had decided to upgrade to its fullest extent before i bite the bullet and start building a new pc with pci16x with either crossfire or sli. I had been using an old geforce fx 5600 with 256 mb for quite some time, and with agp going obsolete, I wanted to get whatever high end agp card i could find before they become hard to find. So, i get an ati (that was the first mistake) radeon 2600 HD pro agp. I figured, its a few years younger and has twice as much memory, newer chipsets and better technology. the card itself is actually about twice the size as the old geforce. Upon installation, I wanted to shoot myself. This card has to be the biggest disappointment i have ever invested in in a pc. With the old ass geforce fx, I was getting between 25-35 fps in world of warcraft at 1400x600 with every setting on medium to medium high. I was able to support full dual monitor resolution with all details turned down with no AA, at some insane res like 2560x1024 and still i got between 20-30 fps. Granted i had overclocked the card quite a bit, but still ran very stable, and not too hot. The new card, simply put, cant even try to do anything at these settings. If WoW loads, ATI's catalyst control center has to reload the graphics driver several times in order to prevent the pc from crashing. So, if for some reason I actually can load wow, as soon as i do ANYTHING in game such as move the mouse over a menu, or god forbid try to move the character, i MIGHT get 2fps on a spectacular day with the explorer tree task ended and wow set to realtime priority. The irony is, I bought this card because I wanted to run crysis. Ha ha. Direct3d doesnt even work anymore. I cant even use google earth. Web pages lock up when you scroll through them, and if i enable agp 4x the system becomes extremely unstable. My advice is, if you must get an agp card anymore, get whatever geforce was last made for agp, which i think was the 7800 or something from the 7xxx series. If you have to get ati, dont waste your time until you have a motherboard which supports one of the nice new models for pci16x. Until then, the only real assuring gpu you can go with the the one people can always trust. Geforce. The fact that my old 256 5600FX outperforms the much newer "HD" radeon is simply bullshit. Furthermore, I cant return the card if i wanted to because Microcenter does not accept returns on agp cards. The salesman was the one who swore up and down that that card would run crysis. A blatant rip-off, not only by the manufacturer, but by the vendor as well.


oh, and this is not about drivers or compatibility. trust me, even if i worked for ati and was able to write my own driver, this card would still run like crap. im not looking for a solution, because there isint anything less than a motherboard upgrade aside from getting the geforce 7xxx agp. I even tried the "hotfix" they made which actually made things worse. It sucks, end of story.
 
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The nVidia 7800GS+/7900 AGP cards are good performers for the AGP. They seem to be rock solid and stable in all AGP machines.

A FASTER card is the new HD 3850 AGP. When you get it working, it really is amazing. Benchmarks on TPU show that for same clock for clock CPU, the 3850 AGP and 3850 PCIe are as fast as each other, ie. no performance penalty for being on AGP.

From my own experience, the 3850 AGP is a fussy card, not working consistently, and not working with all mainboards. Also, from various threads here, and other sites, it seems that Sapphire > HIS > Powercolor. So if you get one, google a bit, to make sure you get a card that is compatible with your mainboard. My experience of the powercolor was not good.
 

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Edit: Made a mistake in title, it's the 2600, not 6600.
My personal review.

3/10

This video card was a disaster. To start things off, the video card would not take the drivers from the CD, itself. Had to locate these drivers off of the Manufacturer's website (which was not ATI, it was some other brand. I took this card back, so I don't remember).

After going through the process of locating the drivers, I had to reboot, normal right? Well unfortunately, all of my BIOS, and checksums were pixelated. After getting back into Windows Vista (yes, the card did say Windows-Vista Compatible), everything was fine (except now Windows was having a rundll error, always fun). Watching movies, I did actually see a performance increase. Amazing quality. When it came to games, is the part that really made me go crazy.

Games Tested:
Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Counter-Strike: Source, Gary's Mod 10, Zombie Rising (HL2 MOD), Portal, Air Rivals, Jedi Outcast 2, Dark Age of Camelot - Catacombs / Labyrinth, and World of Warcraft.

ALL of these games would send both monitors black, and freeze the system withing 10 minutes of playing. I actually tested Counter-Strike: Source first, and the first time this happened, within the first minute of my black-out, the system recovered. It just closed my game, and that was that. It only recovered once. After about a day of this non-sense, I returned the card, because ATI was just giving me generic solutions via phone and email, and the ATI Out-sourced Manufacturer of the card I had purchased's forums were saying there was no fix for this (XP, or Vista), I gave up.

If you're looking for a 512MB AGP Video Card, go nVidia.

nVidia GeForce 7300 GT > ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

Thanks for reading!

lol why would you buy an hd2600 for gaming if X1950pro does the job specialy HIS version
 

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First off, I realize this is an Old Thread. However maybe someone can shed some new light on this subject.

Well I have a:
Asus Mobo P4P800 Deluxe
4Gigs of DDR PC3200 400Mhz Kingston HyperX memory timings (2-3-2-6-1)
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Windows XP PRO service pack 3

I bought this card, and it was supposed to be an upgrade from the x850 xt AIW card that I had....Which it was in a way...being as mainly the shaders 4.0 on this card allowed me to activate graphics on games that I could not see with the x850 xt card.

Anyway,
This card when I first got it installed and ran just fine with the drivers out of the box. No problems at all. I did get mine from Best Buy about January of this year....maybe they had fixed the driver problem with this not sure. It is to my professional opinion as a self proclaimed Geek that all the problems people are having with this card is due to Windows Vista. Which to my understanding blows chunks anyway. I can't for the life of me see why any self-respecting Online PC gamer ...which is mostly composed of from "MMO" gamers. Would even want that OS on their rig.
To start with it takes like 1.2 or 1.5 gigs of system memory just to run the stupid OS. And, thats if you don't go turn all the bells and whistles off (Which most gamers do...to save memory usage...I know I do. Bells and whistles=the GUI options of the OS and the sound and all that stupid pretty junk you don't need to play games). Although, I hear that if you get the service pack installed...this will eliminate most of your nightmares with the OS...but still use most of your system memory.

In short I recommand using Windows XP PRO...unless you are playing Crysis or something that you just have to have that DirectX 10 for.

Now,
Aside from all of that. As I said the card installed just fine and ran everything just great! However the core clock on the card is rather low on the memory clock @ 700 I think it is (I'm on my PC at work I'm not at home so I can't remember for sure) But, I think that the GPU clock is 800mhz and the Memory clock is 700Mhz.

Nonetheless, I only had problems with the card when I tried to play Warhammer Online. I got a lot of "Hitching" which I believe that everyone is getting. Well the common answer to that is always "Update your video drivers and DirectX" Well DirectX was up to date, so I just needed to update the Video Driver. So, thus I tried to do. I like most people do (That know what they are doing) went to uninstall the old driver in order to not have any conflicts.
Well when I went to reboot...all I got was a black screen. I am not even going to go into how I fixed that ...but I did. Well I tried to install the new drivers from ATI and they did not support the card. After a lot of web browsing I discovered that you have to download the driver "Manually Edit it" to support the card and install it from a specified location on your hard drive.

After I did this the card works just perfect again. And, I was able to download the Catalyst Control Center seperately and it is installed and working just fine as well.

The problem that I have with the card right now is that the clocks on the memory are still low. I would like to get the clocks on the memory at least up to around at least 1200. From what I read it should clock up to around 1400. But I'm easy to please I'd be happy if it would at least go to 1000 on the memory.

There is no way that I am even going to attempt such a feat without a "AfterMarket" cooling Heatsink and Fan. So, I'm going to order the Arctic Cooling Accelero TWIN TURBO Quad Heatpipe Universal VGA Cooler and see if I can get the card to overclock to some feasible numbers...if so I'll try to remember to post back on here to let you know what I can get it to do.
 
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