Radeon HD 2400

Radeon HD 2400 is the low-end family in the new Radeon HD 2000 series, also with two models, Pro and XT, with the only difference being the clock used. The most serious difference between the new Radeon HD 2400 family and all other low-end ATI video cards released to date is the memory bus interface: this family uses a 64-bit interface instead of a 128-bit one!

Since video cards using a 64-bit memory interface achieve a performance far lower than their 128-bit counterparts, we still need to do some benchmarking with this new series, because despite its name it may be slower than the “old” Radeon X1300 XT and Radeon X1300 Pro cards!

We know that ATI also released video cards with 64-bit memory interface in the past, but for these cards they used the letters “SE”, so you could clearly identify them.

On Figure 11 you can the Radeon HD 2400 architecture.

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Figure 11: Radeon HD 2400 architecture.

Radeon HD 2400 main features are:

• 40 streaming processors divided into two SIMD arrays with four units per array and five processors per unit.
• Four dispatch ports
• One texture unit (eight texture address processors, 20 texture samples and four texture filter units)
• Unified texture cache
• One rendering unit
• 64-bit memory interface
• Manufactured in 65 nm process

AMD will provide two reference models, one with an active cooler and another with a passive cooler, see Figures 12 and 13. The two boards are identical, the only difference being the cooler.

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Figure 12: Radeon HD 2400 with active cooling.

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Figure 13: Radeon HD 2400 with passive cooling.

According to AMD Radeon HD 2400 will have a typical power consumption of only 25 W (they didn’t say which model they were talking about, Pro or XT).

Radeon HD 2400 Pro and XT are low-end models, using a 64-bit memory interface. At the moment of its release Radeon HD 2400 XT competes directly with GeForce 7300 GT or with GeForce 8400 GS, while the main competitor for Radeon HD 2400 Pro is GeForce 7300 GS.

Model	Clock	Memory Clock	Memory Interface	Memory Configuration	Memory Transfer Rate	Streaming Processors	Suggested Price
Radeon HD 2400 Pro	525 MHz	800 MHz (400 MHz x 2)	64-bit	128 MB or 256 MB DDR2	6.4 GB/s	40	USD 59
Radeon HD 2400 XT	700 MHz	1.6 GHz (800 MHz x 2)	64-bit	256 MB GDDR3	12.8 GB/s	40	USD 79

It is very important to notice that manufacturers can use a memory clock different from what is published above on their models. So you must pay close attention on this spec when comparing video cards based on this new chip, as cards from one manufacturer can be faster than cards from another manufacturer due to the difference on the memory clock used.