- Back to homepage
- Related articles
  Related articles

Very Affordable ATI card from Powercolor, the Radeon HD 2400XT

Videocards/VGA Reviews by geoffrey @ 2007-07-23

Shortly after releasing their long waited HD 2900 XT, ATI announced a new generation of mid-range and low-end graphic accelerators, the HD 2600 and HD 2400 series. The HD 2600 series follow up the X1600 and are ATI´s next best mid-range product while the HD 2400 series are meant for the entry level gamers among us. We take a look at Powercolor´s HD 2400 XT, the fastest in ATI´s HD2400 line-up, to find out what kind of graphic details can be expected with this low cost video card.

Test setup, Benchmark methodology & Overclocking

Test setup

Geoffreys' Intel Test Setup

CPU	Intel E6600 @ 3,6GHz
Cooling	Zalman 9700 LED
Mainboard	ASUS P5B Deluxe
Memory	2x1Gb TEAMGROUP Xtreem 800MHz 4-4-4-10
Other	Silverstone DA750 PSU Maxtor 80Gb PATA HDD Seagate 200GB SATA HDD 20" Dell UltraSharp 2007FP TFT monitor

The CPU was running at 3,6GHz by setting the front side bus to 400MHz and keeping the multiplier at default (9). The memory was running @ 400MHz (800MHz DDR) with 4-4-4-10 timings 1/1 with the FSB.

Catalyst 7.6 with 8-39-5 driver fix

While Windows Vista is now officially launched we decided to test with a mature Windows OS (XP SP2), as most people out there are still using XP.

Benchmark methodology

The game benchmarks were completed with the HD 2400 XT at stock speeds as well as maximum stable overclock setting.

All tests were done with a 20” LCD monitor with a maximum resolution of 1600*1200, though we found that 1024x768 was already stressing this VGA card more then enough, AA and AF aren't very useful as those card just don't have enough rendering power to make good use of those rendering options. We also had to tweak the video options in some games to make them play acceptable at 1024x768.

With our following performance charts you will be informed at all time at what IQ settings were being used. FRAPS was used to measure the FPS during repeated manual run-throughs of a certain part of the games tested, the minimum, maximum and average values were recorded.

Battlefield 2

Tomb Raider: Legend demo

TES: Oblivion

Cal of Duty 2

Quake 4 demo

Futuremark 3DMark Series

Overclocking

The HD2400 series overclocks like any other classic VGA card, no separate clocked GPU core domains this time like NVIDIA did with their G80, but it does seem to have a multiplier problem as the core/mem clock only jumps up with 6,75MHz at a time. This 'bug' also created a slight difference in the readout of core/mem clocks between AMD's GPU Clock Tool and Rivatuner 2.02. In our review we always used AMD's own software tool which reads the Powercolor HD2400XT clocked at 695.24 / 693 MHz (GPU / Mem DDR). Compared to the HD 2400 Pro, the XT comes with a very high clocked R610 GPU, and it seem that ATI really pushed it near the end as we could only gain 40MHz extra on the GPU. The memory on the other hand overclocked very well, 100MHz extra shouldn't be that hard to accomplish, and as we could see on previous page the memory will definitely clock even higher once we start to use volt mods. In the end we managed to overclock our card from 695/693 to 735/837, we tested the performance impact of those higher clock speeds but as the core frequency will probable have the most impact we're not expecting anything special here.

Read on to find out how the Powercolor HD 2400 XT performed in our game tests ->

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/23

Noteworthy for the HDTV fans:

We have already explored Silicon Optix HD HQV in detail. The tests and what we are looking for in them have not changed since our first round. Fortunately, the ability of NVIDIA and AMD hardware to actually perform the tasks required of HD HQV has changed quite a bit.

Both AMD and NVIDIA told us to expect scores of 100 out of 100 using their latest drivers and hardware. We spent quite a bit of time and effort in fully evaluating this test. We feel that we have judged the performance of these solutions fairly and accurately despite the fact that some subjectivity is involved. Here's what we've come up with.

The bottom line is that NVIDIA comes out on top in terms of quality. We've seen arguments for scoring these cards differently, but we feel that this is the most accurate representation of the capabilities offered by each camp.

On the low end, both AMD and NVIDIA hardware begin to stumble in terms of quality. The HD 2400 XT posts quite a lack luster performance, failing in noise reduction and HD deinterlacing (jaggies). But at least it poorly deinterlaces video at full resolution. We excluded tests of NVIDIA's 8500 series, as their video drivers have not yet been optimized for their low end hardware. Even so, we have been given indications not to expect the level of performance we see from the 8600 series. We would guess that the 8500 series will perform on par with the AMD HD 2400 series, though we will really have to wait and see when NVIDIA releases a driver for this.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3047&p=3

Comment from Gamer @ 2007/07/23

Nice review, complete and very good !!
Got some trouble with this though :

Quote:

At 46,7 dBA we can't say that this card is one of the most silent VGA cards I ever tested

Quote:

- Noisy

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/23

"bij 46.7dBa kunnen we niet zeggen dat dit een van de meest stille VGA kaarten was dat we al getest hebben"

we can't say.

Comment from Gamer @ 2007/07/23

Great, just great

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/23

que?

I clarified the sentence a bit, no more confusion now

Comment from Gamer @ 2007/07/23

I guess I need some spectacles, that's it

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.