With the birth of PCI Express slots in computers, AGP cards are slowly becoming a thing of the past. However, I have been using the same computer I built myself about 4 years ago with Windows XP installed and with a Proview 22" LCD monitor and I have just upgraded it as needed over time. As time has progressed, many games and programs demand much more of your computer. I became addicted to World Of Warcraft some time ago and decided that my 256 Mb video card just wasn't cutting it anymore for me, I wanted things to be faster and smoother without having to buy a whole new computer.
I took a trip to my local Best Buy and saw the VisionTek RADEON HD 2600 Pro 512 Mb AGP Video Card on sale for $48.99. I've dealt with Visiontek for a long time now and never had any problems with them so I figured this was a good buy.
System Requirements
Intel Pentium 4 Celeron, AMD Athlon 64, AMD Athlon XP, Sempron or compatible with 8x AGP slot
256 Mb memory (1 Gb recommended for Windows Vista)
CD-ROM Drive
300 watt or greater power supply
Extra power connector (adapter comes in box)
Installation
Installing the card was fairly simple and standard. The only difference between many cards out there is the need to give the card extra power by hooking it up to two molex connectors (power plugs) from your power supply because AGP ports don't give enough power for what this card requires. As long as you don't have any extras such as neons, lighted fans, etc. installed in your computer, a 300 watt power supply is enough to power the card as the system requirements state. If you do have extras installed in your PC, you will probably want to upgrade to a 500 watt or more power supply.
There are also many problems out there relating to the drivers that are provided with the video card, most of the time they just do not work and cause many problems such as the computer locking up or the computer not showing the correct graphics which usually result in the computer locking up. I tried a few different driver websites that say they have the fix for this problem and the one I found that works the best and is the most referred to is http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati.php. The owner of that site takes it upon himself to rewrite video drivers to make them work with many video card models and they are very trustworthy. Just simply download the driver for this card to your computer, install the drivers using the .exe file you download and go through the walkthrough as you would with any installation.
General Opinion
I have been using this video card installed in my computer for about 6 months now. I have played some very demanding gmaes such as World Of Warcraft and Archlord to name a couple and I have been very surprised as well as happy with the card's performance. I also decided to overclock the card just a bit using ATI Tray Tools to get a speed boost and I have absolutely no problems with any video demanding program I run on my computer.
When I was originally having the problems with the card's driver, I also called VisionTek's customer supportand after spending about 45 minutes on the phone with their support tech, I was basically told that they are aware of the driver problems with this series of video cards and that they were working on releasing a fix for the problem. Here we are six months later and no fix has been released so OmegaDrivers is definitely the way to go to get the card to work the way it should.
In closing, if you're looking for a nice video card for a small amount of cash, this card is definitely worth it as long as you don't mind a little extra work to get it working properly.
