ATI 2400 and 2600 deliberately priced low

The problem is that ATI was fibbing in the above slide, the prices for the 2400 and 2600 are way below that point. The high end HD2600XT is going to be in the $119-149 range, a huge discount, and the HD2600Pro is in the $89-99 range. A high end HD2400XT will run you $75-85, while the lower end HD2400Pro will only cost a meager $50-55.

These basically bracket the equivalent Nvidia products while offering equivalent or higher performance. Basically, they kill Nvidia on price/performance. This in itself is good news, but potentially more important are those wattage figures.

If you look closely at those wattage numbers the 2600 is 45W, well under the 75W cap that can be supplied by a single PCIe 16x slot. This means the board can get away without a 6-pin PCIe connector. The equivalent Nvidia cards, the 8600 line, all need a 6-pin connector.

On the lower end cards, the 2400Pro, as pictured above, can be passively cooled. It may not need a 6-pin, nor does the NV 8500(1). The 8500 does however require a fan.

From the benchmarks ive seen, the 2600 does not beat the 8600 series from nvidia.
On the other hand, the power consumption is a big bonus for AMD/ATi here.

atm Im sticking with an ATi x1950xt, ive had a 7900 GT which stopped working after only 7 months... If you dont care about DX10, i still consider the 7950 GT as the best card around - only reliability seems not that good, ive found a lot of users with similar problems that ive had with that chip. But it offers great performance at a low price, does not use a lot of power (comparing to nvidia 8800-series and ATi x19XX )

Links
Benchmarks : http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2007/test_ati_radeon_hd_2400_xt_hd_2600_xt/14/#abschnitt_f_e_a_r
Power consumption: (whole system, not only the gfx card)
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2007/test_ati_radeon_hd_2400_xt_hd_2600_xt/27/#abschnitt_leistungsaufnahme
sry for german links, im usualy browsing german hardware pages, but the grapfhics are self explaining :)

DAAMIT seeds ninja 2900 rig

DAAMIT APPEARS to have come up with some special sauce somewhere in its secret underground lair - the kind of sauce that allows a 2900 XT Crossfire rig to beat the living daylights out of an 8800 GTX rig, something most would have previously thought impossible.

Looking closely at the benchmarks, however, does suggest a reason for the massive discrepancy - the 2900s almost triple the performance of the 8800 system at 2560x1600 in Company of Heroes, with PC Mag bods quoting 84 FPS for the 2900s and 32 FPS for the SLI rig. Our suggestion - Nvidia's drivers still suck when it comes to SLI and Vista, and it could be that DAAMIT has finally gotten its act together on that front.