| HIS X1800GTO IceQ3 Turbo 256MB Graphics Card Review at MaXit |
| Written by Maxit | |||||||
Page 1 of 4 Price: £146.82 inc vatSupplier: www.chillblast.com  Manufacturer: HIS If you need a graphics card for some performance gaming, the HIS X1800 series of graphics cards offers plenty of bang for very little of the green stuff. HIS Digital have cornered a niche for themselves by offering quality cards with fantastic cooling systems. The IceQ cooling system replaces the stock cooler found on reference designs and offers clever design features to help keep noise down and hot air outside your case. The question is, are HIS cards worth the price premium, alebit a small one, over stock reference models... The X1800GTO is ATis recent answer to the rather excellent nVIDIA 7600GT in the upper mid-range. As with its competition, the X1800GTO is a 12 pixel pipeline product, but has the advantage of a full 256 bit memory interface. Today we are looking at the HIS variant, which as usual brings more to the table than your normal reference card copy. 
With this product HIS has replaced the tried and tested pale blue
background box with a new design; a black minimalist look with IceQ 3
emblazoned on the front. It certainly looks stylish, and has a window
in the back to see the card. All of the relevant specs, facts and
figures on the side.  Opening up the box and you will be greeted by the rather huge card itself, as well as a plethora of goodies, including video out cables for Composite, HDTV Component and S-Video, VIVO cables, a PCIe power adaptor lead, 2 DVI-VGA Adaptors, and full copies of the game Flat Out and Power DVD 6. HIS also includes a manual, driver disk and ATI bonus demo disk into the mix as well. As you can see this is an extremely good bundle, right up there with the best we have seen here at BSR. When you consider the card costs just over £140 inc VAT, this is exceptional value.  The Card Spec Click for full picture The card itself is really massive as previously mentioned, and uses the same PCB as the X1800XL. This is not true for X1800GTOs from other manufacturers which have one less mosfets on the PCB. This made us think that the X1800GTO from HIS could possibly be unlocked to all 16 pipelines without too much difficulty more on this later. The IceQ cooler makes a welcome return, though this version is considerably weightier than previous models, with more copper and an impressive heat pipe derived design. Clock speeds are 500MHz for the core and 1GHz for the DDR3 memory, though HIS guarantees a clock speed of 520MHz for this IceQ Turbo model. |
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