Sapphire Radeon 2600 Pro

The Radeon 2600 Pro was fairly affordable in 2007 with it's price tag of around $99, but didn't deliver the best performance you can get. This particular card is equipped with dual DVI ports and back when this card was new this was one of the requirements of the owner: he wanted a dual monitor setup and play a few basic games every now and then.

The 2600 Pro is, along with the 2600 XT, based on the RV630 chip. This chip includes video decoding acceleration for MPEG2, VC-1 and H.264. The original R600-chip (for the higher end cards) did not have this feature. Also the RV630 is fabricated on the smaller 65nm process opposed to the 80nm process. Due to this the 2600 Pro runs far cooler than the 2900XT for example.

I haven't benchmarked the card myself but looking back at reviews this card didn't really compete with nVidia GeForce 8 series. It's that the price of the 2600 Pro was low enough to justify it. The faster 2600 XT was priced in the same category (about $150, $160 at launch) as the GeForce 8600 GT but can't keep up with that card.