Incidentally, in addition to the new desktop parts, AMD also launched today a line of new Mobility GPUs that use the same silicon, although the Mobility Radeon HD 2300's name is a something of a red herring as it's a DirectX 9 part that is essentially a Mobility Radeon X1600 with the addition of a UVD.

PowerColor's HD 2400 XT

The HD 2600 XT that PowerColor sent us uses the reference core speed of 800MHz with 256MB of GDDR 3 memory that runs at a true speed of 700MHz to deliver an effective clock rate of 1400MHz.

We ran the HD 2600 XT in a test PC with a Core 2 Duo QX6800, an Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard and 2GB of Kingston 1100MHz DDR3 memory and found that performance in 3DMark06 and Oblivion was level pegging with a n Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT. In Half Life 2 the system restarted repeatedly with the HD 2600 XT, but performed flawlessly with the 8600 GT until we loaded the Beta drivers that we used with the HD 2400 XT, which cured the problem. so it looks as though AMD has some work to do on its Catalyst drivers.

Half Life 2 test

Longer bars are better

As the HD 2600 XT is only one step - albeit a big step - below the HD 2900 XT you might have hoped that it would outperform the 8600 GT, but as things stand Nvidia remains unchallenged in the £150 market segment, if such things are important to you.