Introduction

Late last year we look at an interesting product from HIS, a Hong Kong based ATI graphics card maker, who produced a rather solid product which was focused towards the enthusiast computer user market. They took an X700 PRO and placed it on a PCB and married it with a fancy cooler from Arctic Cooling which was capable of reaching X700XT speeds and above. Using a piece of Windows software called "iTURBO", you are easily able to adjust clock speeds and monitor fan speeds and temperatures on-the-fly. This was the first attempt from HIS to really generate attention from enthusiasts and from our standpoint; they did a pretty darn good job at doing it.

HIS are back in the labs again this month with their latest generation of cards, the PCI Express versions of the ATI Radeon X850XT and X800XL. Both cards are part of the HIS IceQ II series which claim (and do) to offer better cooling than ATI reference cards as well as not exceeding 20db in the noise department. Both cards support iTURBO and the X850XT version even has a standard iTURBO overclocked setting which matches the clock speeds of the more expensive X850XT PE. That means you'll get the performance of the ultra high-end X850XT PE for the price of the high-end X850XT.

In this article we'll take a look at the cards, the special features (such as iTURBO), the package and then compare both cards against each other at their stock speeds and then at the overclocked iTURBO speeds. If you're on the market for a new PCI Express graphics card which offers impressive performance, one of these might do the trick for you. Read on and find out if HIS has what it takes to make it into your system.

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