Powercolor HD2400XT

Inside the box you should find:

• Manual
  
• DVI to HDMI adapter
  
• S-video to AV adapter
  
• Driver CD

The card itself is very small compared to the high-end boys I've been reviewing past months, though nothing special compared to other entry level stuff. The amount of components found on this card is kept very low, while this is certainly cost reducing we hope that our card remains stable at any given moment. For their HD 2400 XT Powercolor chose for active cooling by combining a small black heatsink with a low quality 40mm fan. This made this card a single slot solution which shouldn't cause problems during install.



At the back of the card we didn't find any additional power connectors. The jumper you'll see is of no use for the average pc enthusiast and could also be found on other ATI vga cards to select the PAL/NTSC standard for TV-Out. Actually a small sized dip-switch is used most often instead of this jumper, though using a classic jumper will certainly reduce the extra costs even further.



On each side of the PCB two memory IC's have been placed, and as you can see on the picture below those chips don't come with any kind of heatsink/fan cooling solution. The black heatsink found on the front of the card doesn't provide additional cooling for the front mem-IC's, these are DDR2 and don’t really needed when used at lower clock speeds.

As stated on ATI's site these cards also come with support for CrossFire graphics, but no additional CF connectors have been added and so the cards have to fall back to the systems PCIe bus. Though, with cards like these it's very questionable why we would ever need CrossFire as it probable isn’t a better choice compared to a single mid-range HD 2600.



Powercolor's cooling gear is mounted through 4 mounting holes located in a square around the GPU, mounting pressure is applied by 4 bolts which can be found on the back of the card. Between the HD 2400 XT's GPU core and the heatsink Powercolor applied white thermal goop which is just perfect for this kind of application. If one should want to improve cooling ability's you should definitely look into replacing the low profile heatsink.



The R610 GPU uses the same architecture technologies of R600 GPU found on the HD 2900 XT, that way DirectX 10 compatible programmable shaders become available for the entry level market. Compared to the high-end R600 transistor count has been reduced from 700 million transistors to around 180 million and by using the smaller 65nm fabrication process it's without doubt a few times less power hungry then its high-end counterpart. The down side here is that the amount of stream processors also falls back from 320 to only 40 parallel processing units.



Hynix DDR memory is very popular on VGA cards, on this HD 2400 XT we found four HY5RS123235FP GDDR3 chips each good for 64MB resulting in a total available memory space of 256MB. The chips below are rated for 700MHz DDR at 2.00V, though with 0.20 extra volts they should do just fine up to 900MHz, overclockers will be satisfied with the headroom left in those chips.



Classic 9 pins Sub-D and DVI connections can be found together with an S-Video connector. HDMI is available by using the included DVI to HDMI adapter and with 5.1 surround sound onboard this card has more to offer then we've ever thought!



Let's go onto the test setup and benchmarks ->