With the significant price differences in the latest ATI offerings Sapphire has managed to just about cover everyone's price range. While they offer the very high end HD 2900XT's at around $390 you can step down to a slightly slower HD 2600 XT for $140. This is a pretty big price difference to say the least. While these cards do offer more in the line of performance they are still not in everyone's price range. Enter the Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256MB. Coming in last in the 2600 series. While the 2600 Pro boasts good performance on the box will it be able to perform up to those standards.
Checking out the retail package we can find most of the important information we would want to know before buying this card such as the interface, system requirements, what's included in the box, etc. In addition to this you will also find information on Crossfire compatibility, product highlights and of course a small mention of the awards that Sapphire has collected over the past several years which includes over 600 since 2002, impressive.

Inside that nice outer shell you have the plain jane cardboard box which contains the goodies. This was actually nice to see considering how many products today are over packaged wasting enough material for 2 or 3 more of the same package. Inside the box you will see that Sapphire opted to use a very well constructed box rather than a big plastic clam shell to hold the card and using only a simple static bag. The other contents of the box are left to "float" around under the card.

Let's see what we have here. The contents are pretty much standard with the driver cd, quick installation guide, DVI to VGA adapter, S-Video to Composite adapter and a HDTV RGB Composite output cable. Also included is a free game offer from Steam of Half Life 2 - Lost Coast and Death match. Nothing major but free is free in my humble opinion. Hmmm..., did I miss anything.... DOH!! of course, we have the Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 Pro video card.

Let's take a closer look. |