AMD has released the arrival of the ATI Radeon HD 2600 and Radeon HD 2400 series graphics cards.

Normally, we would write a review in time for the launch, but due to AMD's wisdom to not only bring the release date forwards by a few days and to also not seed us with hardware until Sunday evening, we have simply not had enough hours in the day to run all of our benchmarks.

The cards in these series' make up the mid-range and entry-level portions of the ATI Radeon HD 2000 family and offer all of the features found in the Radeon HD 2900 XT, with performance obviously cut down to match the price point.

Interestingly, AMD has opted not to go after Nvidia's GeForce 8600 GTS with a single chip solution on the pricing front and has instead targeted Nvidia's GeForce 8600 GT with its ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT.

There will be two versions of this card though - one with GDDR4 memory, and one with GDDR3 memory. The latter is obviously designed to hit a lower price point but the top end version should be around ?0 (inc VAT) in the UK. Looking around bit-tech's shopping engine, the cheapest GeForce 8600 GTS we could find is below ?18, which is in a different pricing bracket to AMD's fastest single chip mid-range part.