In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Intel HD i7 2600 are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon HD 4290.

The HD i7 2600 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 4290, but the Radeon HD 4290 has 3 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD i7 2600. As a result, the Radeon HD 4290 exhibits a 1.9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD i7 2600. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD i7 2600 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 4290, but the Radeon HD 4290 has 3 more Render Output Units than the HD i7 2600. As a result, the Radeon HD 4290 exhibits a 1.9 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD i7 2600. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD i7 2600 was released less than a year after the Radeon HD 4290, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very poor performance, so rather than upgrading from one to the other you should consider looking at more powerful GPUs. Neither of these will be able to run the latest games in any playable way.

The Radeon HD 4290 has 128 MB video memory, but the HD i7 2600 does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

The HD i7 2600 has 6 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4290 has 40. However, the actual shader performance of the HD i7 2600 is 32 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18. The HD i7 2600 having 14 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD i7 2600 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 4290.

The HD i7 2600 transistor size technology is 23 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon HD 4290. This means that the HD i7 2600 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon HD 4290. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the HD i7 2600 should consume less power than the Radeon HD 4290.

The HD i7 2600 requires 95 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4290. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the HD i7 2600.