Sapphire Technology has announced a new addition to the HD 2400 and HD 2600 graphics accelerator families scheduled for a July release, the completely passively cooled HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition. As fans of the Sapphire Ultimate Edition family will already be aware, these are renowned for not only being silent running, but also their enhanced performance and overclocking capabilities. Because of very low power consumption of these GPU’s a totally passive cooling solution can be used without impacting upon the class leading performance levels. The HD 2600 XT Ultimate features the latest unified shader architecture with 24 shader pipelines, a 128-bit memory bus and high speed GDDR3 memory.

Full specs for the HD 2600 XT Ultimate are:

• Engine Clock - 800 MHz
• Memory Speed – 1400 MHz
• Memory Configuration - 512 MB GDDR3
• Display Connectors - DVI-I + DVI-I + VIVO
• 2x Dual Link DVI
• PCI Express Interface
• Multi-Channel Audio (5.1 Surround) via HDMI Support

Also announced are the HD 2600 Pro with a similar architecture but using GDDR2 memory, and the HD 2400 XT / HD 2400 Pro which are both cost effective solutions featuring 8 unified shader pipelines and a 64-bit memory interface using GDDR3 and GDDR2 memory respectively.

Both of the HD 2600 and HD 2400 series’ also incorporate the latest ATI Avivo HD Video & Display Technology. An exciting new feature is the built in hardware UVD – a dedicated Unified Video Decoder that accelerates the decoding of Blu-ray and HD DVD content with dramatically reduced load on the system CPU, making even the low-end cards in the series ideal for media centre applications.

Two Dual Link DVI outputs are provided on all models. HDMI users are supported with another new feature that Multi-Channel 5.1 Audio is integrated onboard with the graphics output to provide true audio and video output via an HDMI adapter for direct connection to an HDMI ready TV.

Developed to natively support the latest applications using Microsoft Direct X® 10 and Shader Model 4.0, for a whole new generation of performance, this series brings new meaning to the Windows Vista Premium Experience.