Overall, the AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR4 has poor performance. This should be expected only from older dedicated graphics cards, so this graphics card should definitely be avoided if building a system to power modern applications and games. This graphics card is now over 13 years old, which means it is extremely out of date and is based on very aged technologies. This graphics card will be dwarfed in performance by its modern counterparts, and will likely have very little driver support from AMD.

At this performance level you would be better off getting a CPU with an integrated GPU, because a dedicated graphics card like the AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR4 would not be worth the extra investment, and an integrated solution would be much cheaper, produce less heat, and require less power. We would recommend an Intel Iris GPU on one of the latest Intel Haswell processors, such as the Iris Pro Graphics 5200 Desktop, or one of AMD's latest APU Family graphics solutions such as the Radeon HD 8670D.

With an effective SPU count of 62, the AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR4 processes shading and special graphical effects fairly poorly. The GPU is not too power-hungry at 50 Watts, however.