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Power Usage

We tested the power draw by using a P3 International Kill a Watt energy-usage monitor. Our 'load' environment was achieved by using a particularly demanding part of 3DMark06.

As mentioned earlier, the RX2600XT Diamond Plus does not require an additional power connector. Even with that in mind, it draws an impressively low amount of power when not under stress. And when stressed, the RX2600XT requires roughly 10 Watts less than the XFX 8600 GT XXX. Not bad.

Final Thoughts

More often than not, in video card testing, a particular hierarchy is established early on in the slew of benchmarks, and there is not much variation in further tests. But this wasn't the case with the MSI RX2600XT Diamond Plus -- so let's briefly recap how it did.

On the sunny-side of things, the MSI RX2600XT performed admirably in Team Fortress 2 and X3. As for DX10 benching, the RX2600XT also did well in Call of Juarez. Even though the framerates reached in the DX10 Call of Juarez bench were at unplayable levels (between 10 and 20 FPS), this bench was run at the highest quality settings -- settings that even the fastest cards have trouble with. With this in mind, I feel that the RX2600XT shows good DX10 performance here, for a mid-range card.

Now for the not-so-sunny-side of things. In both F.E.A.R and Doom 3, the RX2600XT was out-maneuvered by the less expensive XFX 8600 XT. As for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, while not dominated by the 8600 GT, the RX2600XT still did not perform all that well -- I'd expect that any gamer in the market for a new card would hope that their new purchase would smoothly run a 2+ year old game with AA at 1280x1024.

With 512 MB of GDDR4, the RX2600XT will better cope with the upcoming memory-hungry games of 2008. However, the performance advantage of the extra 256 MB did not seem to be as noticeable as one might expect, in our benchmarks.  

These black-marks notwithstanding, the MSI RX2600XT is still a good mid-range card that compared well against our XFX 8600 GT and GTS, XXX-edition, out-of-the-box overclocked cards. But what prevents the MSI RX2600XT from  really separating itself from the pack is the same situation that every other of this current generation's 'upper mid-range' cards have faced: for DX9 gaming, the HD 2600 XT and 8600 GTS's that I have seen do not perform favorably against the similarly priced high-end cards of last generation; and when it comes to DX10 gaming, all of the 'upper mid-range' cards that I have tested do not seem to have the horsepower to reliably deliver solid DX10 gaming performance. Whether better DX10 performance will come with further maturation of the API, or future Catalyst driver optimizations, still remains to be seen.

In the end, MSI's RX2600XT Diamond Plus is a good mid-range card -- but some may wish that it had just a little bit more in order to propel into a class of its own: the upper mid-range.