The Visiontek 2600XT Quad
Bundled with the card are the standard cables and extras such as DVI>VGA connectors, as well as a driver CD and a Valve voucher. The two items which are a little "out of the ordinary" is the bundled DVI>HDMI adaptor which passes through audio and video and a small leaflet explaining how HDMI audio should be configured.
As you can see from the pictures above the 2600XT Quad is quite beautiful, in fact the pictures do not do it justice. The first thing which stands out is the large cooler, a dual slot copper model with a fan placed slightly left of centre. There are actually two printed circuit boards in use, the first is the main one (21cm x 10.2cm) which features the usual video card components such as graphics processing units and memory. The second is a smaller PCB which powers the DVIs for the additional GPU. On the top right hand corner of the card is the six pin PCIe power connector. Despite the dual core design of this card only one power cable is required.
As with other 2600XTs this model has a core clock speed of 800MHz, DDR 2 memory weighs in at 500/1000MHz. There are 120 stream processing units on the core and Universal Video Decoder (HDCP supported) is present for full acceleration of high definition movies. There is one major difference which we mentioned briefly earlier in the article, and that is the inclusion of two 2600 cores and a CrossFire bridge chip under the cooler. Basically what we have here is a 2600XT CrossFire setup sandwiched together on one PCB with 512Mb of memory available to each core. It also means that the card is reliant on CrossFire driver profiles to achieve maximum performance.
On the back of the card Visiontek have placed a large metal bracket which holds the heatsink in place. This is achieved by screws that pass through the PCB and a metal bar which curves round from the front of the card. The outputs are four dual-link DVIs and so the product is capable of driving four 2560x1600 displays. On the bottom left corner it is also possible to see one of the memory chips, it is a 2.0ns branded component and so is right on specification. Finally, the 2600XT Quad uses a 256-bit ring bus for memory read and write operations.
