Sapphire demos AGP and PCI-Ex Radeon 2600 XT units

New AGP card releases are becoming increasingly rare as it is phased out, making Sapphires latest offerings noteworthy. Sapphire is bringing two new Radeon HD 2600 models to the market, including an AGP Radeon HD 2600 XT and a PCI Express variant of the same card. The PCI Express unit is actually cheaper, which corresponds to AGP parts slowly being harder to come by. Aside from that, however, the cards are extremely similar. The AGP unit will have 256MB of GDDR3 and will require external power like other PCI -Ex cards, has VGA and DVI output as well as native hi-def decoding.

In order to reduce the cost of the unit, Sapphire went with a 4-layer PCB design. This has the side effect of making that model have no CrossFire support:

Due to the PCB reduction, the internal CrossFire connectors are absent, so the card will not be hardware CrossFire compatible.
Supposedly, however, with software updates from AMD this will change, enabling latent CrossFire functionality without the need for a cable. The cards aren't available yet, and won't be for a while as AMD has yet to officially release these GPUs. They are expected to do that in July.