VisionTek Radeon HD 2600 Pro user reviews (PCI-e, 512MB)

Pros The price was right... but don't be fooled by the hype !

Cons The worse card since the S3 Virge !

Summary I purchased this card on Black Friday from Best Buy (11-23-2007), it was listed as costing 199.99, but it was on "sale" for 99 bucks (there was supposed to be a minimum of 5 per store). So I got up 3:30 am, and headed out to Best Buy. The Best Buy I went to had at least 50 to 150 of these cards, but that is another story. So I got home, and I replaced my native ATI X1650 512 MB Pro card for this 3 rd party CRAPPOLA ! I am a seasoned PC rebuilder, and I know my stuff, but I was swayed by the price. The GPU on this thing is "over-clocked to 601", and the RAM Clock speed is 405 MHZ, a far cry from ATI specs of 800 mhz GPU. My system specs are as follows: DualCore Pentium D 805 2.66 Ghz / 2 Gigs of DDR2 533 Ram / 1 8X AGP Slot/ on an ECS P4M800Pro-M2 Mobo./powered by a PowerUp 550 watts PSU.Grant you, this is NOT the most powerful system out there, but I was getting great game play from my original X1650 card. I only wanted to upgrade, since the new card was DirectX 10 compatable, and I wish to upgrade to Vista Ultimate soon. (I am running Windows XP Pro now). I have another PC with the NVIDIA 8600 GTX video card, and I have been playing Time Shift, Call Of Duty 4, Clive Barker's Jericho, Soldier Of Fortune Payback and Kane And Lynch, with the settings cranked up, and those games look and play great ! With this card I can barly play Time Shift, and I have to turn the settings down to low to get any fluid game play. In fact a couple of my games (Call Of Juarez, and Half Life 2 episode 2, won't even start !)So I implore you, do not bother with this 3 rd party crap, get the Sapphire version of this card if you must have a 3rd party version of the card, go here for those specs...http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102711 .