You gotta love competition, the new AMD Radeon HD 2600/2400 has hardly made it to the online shops before the price war starts. OcUK is one of the first e-tailer in the UK to list the Radeon HD 2600/2400 series and before they even have stock of the cards, Nvidia drops its price.

All of the Radeon HD 2600 cards on OcUK is listed as pre-order. A 256MB Sapphire 2600 Pro will set you back £64.61 inc VAT while the 512MB version of the same card will cost you £70.49. Moving up to the 2600 XT you can pick up a GDDR3 version, again from Sapphire, for £82.24. HIS is charging £93.99 for it's 512MB GDDR3 card.

There are three different GDDR4 cards listed, but they all cost the same, £93.99 and the manufacturers are PowerColor, Sapphire and HIS. We can't help but think that these prices seem a little bit high compared to the US SRP, although with 17.5 per cent VAT removed, the GDDR4 cards are £79.99 which works out close to US$160 which is only slightly higher than the expect US SRP.

If you'd rather go for an Nvidia card after you've seen the benchmarks of the new mainstream ATI parts, then you'll be glad to hear that the prices of these cards have dropped over night. You can pick up OcUK's own branded 8600GT for as little as £78.71 inc VAT and their 8500GT will set you back a mere £51.69.

You might call this cheating, as these cards will be from some cheap unknown company, well, how about Asus then? You can get an Asus 8600GT for £91.64 and an Asus 8500GT for £64.61, Other manufacturers such as Leadtekand BFG are selling their cards for the same prices.

It's interesting that the 8500GT is priced exactly the same as the 256MB 2600 Pro, as it is likely to be the faster out of the two. The 8600GT is slightly cheaper than the GDDR4 version of the 2600 XT and this is about right, since the AMD card is slightly faster.

Amazingly, the OcUK 8500GT is cheaper than the Sapphire 2400 XT, which is listed at a pre-order price of £58.74 inc VAT. Sapphire's 2400 Pro is in stock and is listed at £37.59.

You can find the Radeon HD 2600 pricing here, the 2400 pricing here and the new 8500GT/8600GT pricing here.