In our review we were able to compare the new Radeon HD 2600 XT to GeForce 8600 GT and to a vast range of new and old mid-range PCI Express video cards, as you could see on our previous pages.

With both GeForce 8600 GT and Radeon HD 2600 XT with GDDR4 memory having a suggested price of USD 150, they are clearly targeted to users that are looking for the best cost/benefit ratio possible, i.e., to users that want to play games at a good performance but don’t want to buy an expensive high-end model.

So, which one is the best for Average Joe?

Well, we are pretty confident that GeForce 8600 GT still is the best video card for the average user that is willing to spend up to USD 150 on a decent video card. It is faster than Radeon HD 2600 XT in almost all situations, you can buy it right away and, best of all, even though its suggested price is of USD 150 you can easily find GeForce 8600 GT models costing less. Since Radeon HD 2600 XT is not available at this writing, it may reach the market initially costing more than GeForce 8600 GT.

It is also very important to keep in mind that another Radeon HD 2600 XT model will be available using GDDR3 memories running at a lower clock rate and at a lower price: it will have a suggested price of USD 130. So if you find a cheap Radeon HD 2600 XT being sold, beware, this particular model isn’t a direct competitor to GeForce 8600 GT. And cheap here will mean far slower.

For those interested, here is a summary of our bechmarking. GeForce 8600 GT was between 9% and 50% faster than Radeon HD 2600 XT on 3DMark03, between 8% and 20% faster on Quake 4 and between 17% and 98% faster on Far Cry. On F.E.A.R. Radeon HD 2600 XT was between 42% and 47% faster when no image quality settings were enable, but when we increase image quality GeForce 8600 GT was between 37% and 50% faster. And on Battlefield 2142 Radeon HD 2600 XT was faster than GeForce 8600 GT only at 1024x768 with no image quality settings enabled (6% faster), on other scenarios GeForce 8600 GT was between 4% and 28% faster.

The only program where Radeon HD 2600 XT was faster was on 3DMark06, with a performance advantage between 5% and 7%. Which isn’t really a significant advantage when we consider all other results.

Oh yes. Radeon HD 2600 XT supports HDMI with digital audio routed directly to the HDMI connector. That is definitely an advantage over GeForce 8600 GT if you are into high-def video.