Testing

For graphics card testing we run the GPU through a series of synthetic and gaming benchmarks to determine how effective they are in different environments with varying amounts of Anti Aliasing and Anistropic Filtering. The tests we ran were as follows:

3Dmark06, 3Dmark05, 3Dmark03, Half Life 2: Lost coast, FEAR and X3 reunion. These were run at the following settings:

3Dmark06: Stock
3Dmark05: Stock
3Dmark03: Stock
Half Life 2: Lost Coast: 1280x1024, 4xAA, 16AF, everything else set at full.
X3 Reunion: Default settings.
FEAR: Both CPU and GPU settings set to "Maximum" .

The PC that this card was tested in was:

Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.7ghz
Asus P5W-DH Deluxe
OCZ 2gb Special Ops 6400 @ 900mhz
Tagan Silver Power 600w

The other cards that the Crossfired 2600XTs will be compared to will be: a 2600XT, 8600GT, 8600GTS, x1950 Pro and a 8800GTS 320mb.

As with the single 2600XT I had trouble getting the benchmarks to run with standard drivers, so I used soma pre-release dev drivers from Sapphire that made benching possible. They were the 8.38.9.1 drivers.

Overclocking

Unfortunately, as I found with the single 2600xt, overclocking with these cards is very difficult as even though the clock speeds can be read by Rivatuner and AMD GPU Tool, raising the frequency doesn't have any impact on benchmark results. Therefore I have just taken stock results and may update this review with OC results once compatibility with tools improves.