Conclusion

Featuring the passive cooling system Silent Pipe II, the Gigabyte Technology GV-RX26T256H graphics card has left the impression of a well-made product. Good accessories, an absolutely silent cooler, a clever PCB design, and a rich functionality of ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT that includes DirectX 10 support and the advanced Avivo HD engine – all of this is going to suit perfectly for a home multimedia system, but we have to note the low performance in 3D games.

The Gigabyte GV-RX26T256H could hardly yield an acceptable frame rate in most of our tests. The minimum speed suffered the most from the reduction of its memory frequency. The performance hit from a few to 10 percent relative to the reference ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 often makes the Gigabyte card slower than its main opponent Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT. Besides the reduced memory bandwidth, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 is overall weak in 3D games.

It should be acknowledged that graphics cards like ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR and Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT/GTS cannot deliver high performance in modern games unless you lower the graphics quality settings and play in resolutions below 1280x1024. These cards may even be slower than previous-generation products such as ATI Radeon X1950 Pro.

So, if you need a silent and economical graphics card for applications other than gaming, you should consider the Gigabyte GV-RX26T256H. It is compact and offloads the CPU greatly when playing HD video (for details see our article called The Look of Perfect: Analysis of Graphics Accelerators Performance during Media Playback). It supports HDMI output (with an appropriate adapter) and offers high-quality post-processing for HD video (for details see this article) .

But if you need a graphics card for playing games, the Gigabyte GV-RX26T256H with its GDDR3 memory and a reduced memory frequency cannot be a good buy for you. If you are seriously into games and want to enjoy them fully, you should search among high-end products such as ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro or Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB.

Highs:

• DirectX10 support;
• Full hardware HD video decoding;
• High-quality post-processing for HD video;
• Efficient and quiet cooling system;
• Low power consumption;
• Low price;
• Native HDMI support with audio output.

Lows:

• Not very high performance in contemporary games;
• No DVI→HDMI adapter bundled with the card.