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The first thing that struck me when I pulled the RX2600XT Diamond Plus out of the box was that it did not look like any other HD 2600 XT I've come across.

For starters, the card was larger than I expected: it almost had the same dimensions as a HD 2900 XT. The  PCB (circuit board) measured just a bit short of 9 inches. As you can see, lengthwise, the RX2600XT is about 33% longer than this Powercolor HD 2600 XT (256MB GDDR3):

This relatively large size holds true width-wise, as well: the RX2600XT has a double-slot size cooler, so expect this card to probably render any PCI slot beside the card unusable. For a mid-range card, the RX2600XT takes a up a lot of motherboard real-estate.

As for the cooler itself, it is definetly a deperature from the typical HD 2600 XT cooler design. Athestically, it looks nice, with the MSI android on it, and at first glance, has the appearance of a high-end cooler. As you can see from the overhead shot below, the pathway that air takes after being pushed by the fan, is not totally encased in plastic -- it looks like  some hot air might 'spill' out between the cooler and the PCB. An appreciable amount of air does get channeled through the centre of the card and out of the rear of the video card's cooler, however.

The heatsink is composed of three parts: a major sink sitting on the GPU, which is connected via heat-pipe to a second, minor sink which is 1.5 centimetres off the PCB.

Noise-wise, this cooling situation is a more on the loud side than the quiet side, as coolers go; but is far from being unreasonably loud.

And good cooling is required, because the RX2600XT has an out-of-the-box overclock of 850 MHz -- 50 MHz above the standard HD 2600 XT. While a 50 MHz overclock is nice, it is a bit on the modest side. In all likelihood, you can expect 50 MHz not to drastically improve performance.

As for the memory, it also needs proper cooling as well, and this is taken care of by aluminum heat-sinks, attached by thermal tape. Here we have probably the largest selling point of the RX2600XT: 512 megabytes of GDDR4. By the way, the 'Plus' of the name RX2600XT Diamond Plus differiantes this model from the Diamond model, which has 256 MB of GDDR4, and sells for (very roughly) $30 dollars less.

The memory is also overclocked, at 2300 MHz, which is 100 MHz above typical HD 2600 XT cards.

You might be wondering what kind of difference GDDR4 makes over GDDR3. For maximum data transfer speed, GDDR4 is about %55 faster than GDDR3. GDDR4 also features a 8-bit burst length, which gives it lower latency rating when compared to GDDR3. Another benefit of GDDR4 over GDDR3, is that it requires less power: GDDR4 runs at 2.1 volts (compared to 1.9 volts for GDDR3), and this translates into energy savings -- and not to mention, it also bodes well for overclocking potential of the RX2600XT Diamond Plus.

And one more thing: the RX2600XT doesn't require a power connector. It draws all needed power solely from your PCI-E slot.