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After having my Nvidia Geforce 7600GS mid-range graphics card in my custom pc for approximately 8 months, I was ready for an upgrade but having an AGP graphics card slot I thought there was very few viable upgrade paths for me, until I saw the ATI HD 2600XT that is of course.

The Sapphire ATI HD 2600XT is the first of the line of ATI graphics cards to bring DirectX10 compatibility to users that still have an AGP motherboard. The HD 2600XTis the highest card in this particular series of cards.

The HD 2600XT boasts 256MB of dedicated DDR3 RAM, which is enough memory to power even the most texture hungry games out there in the current PC games market. Also, with a core clock speed of 800Mhz and a memory clock speed of 1400Mhz, the HD 2600XT is yards ahead of it's closest priced competitors. The HD2600XT also contains video de-coding technology that is incomparable to that of competing cards, that are even more highly priced.

What kind of performance can you expect from this card? At the end of the day it is still a value card but you do get a lot of bang for your buck. From my experience you will be able to run most of today's latest games at the highest settings on a 1024x768 resolution. The only exception to this is the graphics car hungry game 'Crysis'. The HD 2600XT will run Crysis smoothly on between Medium to High Settings at 1024x768, which is extremely good for a card of this price. This card also runs 'Call of Duty 4' on Ultra High settings and looks beautiful. However, I must warn you that although this card is capable of running DirectX10, you will have an extremely unplayable experience as only the most expensive graphics cards will run DirectX10 in their comfort zone.

The video-decoding feature on this graphics card is also a brilliant feature and will take away a lot of the stress away from the CPU, both giving you a smoother DVD experience whilst prolonging the lifespan of your CPU.

The HD2600XT is perfectly priced for many users. For anyone who is looking for an upgrade to their AGP graphics card then look no further than the HD2600XT. A great card at a great price that will mean you can play today's latest game the way you want to play it.

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