If we had our way, over-enthusiastic cooling fans would be consigned to history. This is unlikely to happen any time soon, but the RX2600XT is a good example of what we’d like to see. ATi’s 2600 XT is the most powerful of its mid-range components, but MSI has stripped the reference design of its cooler, installing heatpipes that ferry heat away from the GPU and onto a large aluminium heatsink on the back.

It translates to a bulky graphics card, but you won’t have many problems squeezing it into a chassis, including small Shuttle-style cases. Since it’s passively cooled, it doesn’t even require a PCI Express power connector, making installation straightforward.

Inevitably, the 2600 XT became very warm to the touch while running our 3D benchmarks. This didn’t lead to any stability issues in our testing, but it will inevitably push up the temperature of a closed desktop PC, and you’re likely to need some reasonable chassis cooling to keep the air moving.

Our performance results were respectable, too. At our medium settings, Call of Duty 2 ran at 19fps, which is borderline playable; dropping the settings to their lowest produced a more convincing 40fps. It was a similar story for our DirectX 10 test, Call of Juarez. It looks superb even at its medium settings, but produced an average frame rate of just 10fps. Our lowest settings ran at a smooth 30fps, though. This isn’t bad news, with 1024 x 768 looking fine on most LCD displays.

As befits a card perfect for a media-centre PC, the RX2600XT offers plenty besides reasonable performance and silent running. There’s a DVI-to-HDMI converter in the box for connecting a flat-screen TV, and the card has an Azelia HD audio controller built onto it so you can use an HDMI cable to carry both a video and audio signal, and it’s HDCP-compatible. The 7-pin video-out port can be connected to a variety of cables, with converters for component, composite and S-Video included.

The RX2600XT is a bargain at under $200, sweetened by the silent cooler and media-centre practicality.