SUMMARY: In August we saw the introduction of ATI's Radeon X800GT which finally gave some competition to nVidia against their mighty mid-range GeForce 6600GT. Maybe the X800GT was a stop gap for ATI until their next-generation of cards is released but nevertheless the VPU is penetrating the market and we've got two new cards in the labs from HIS and PowerColor. Read on as we take a look at both graphics cards and work out which is best in this head to head battle!
HIS as always has a great looking box with a window so you can see the card without having to worry about opening the box. It lists the key features of the card including 256MB DDR3 memory, PCI Express, TV Out, DVI, HDTV, UV Sensitive and Platinum Software Pack. They also state the 11c cooler then stock (cooling) and under 20dB logo like all their ICE Q cards.
HIS has a slightly larger box then PowerColor and have utilized all of it including a full picture of the card, showing a picture of the dual DVI model, extended specifications, more key features along the bottom a list of awards including two from yours truly along with other little bits of information across a multitude of languages.
Like the PowerColor card, the only paperwork we have is the very well designed looking manual. It almost makes you want to read it… ;)
Aside from the manual we have an S-Video cable, S-Video to RCA cable, HDTV cable, DVI to VGA connector and a bracket to use next to the VGA slot.
Software side we have HIS’s overclocking utility, a game demo CD, utility CD, full version of Dungeon Siege and a copy of Flat Out.
The HIS offering gives us a very good bundle for a budget card and we are getting quite use to this from HIS.
- The Card
The ICE Q card comes with the Arctic Cooling solution that we have seen on a lot of the HIS cards we have received lately as well as the tweaked ASUS 7800 GTX. The cooler covers the entire card and thanks to the large fan we note only get something that cools extremely efficiently but also is as quiet as a whisper.
Flipping the card over we have the big back plate that not only holds the cooler on the front of the card but also helps cool the back memory.
Moving to the side of the card we have one DVI connector and one standard VGA connector. While this particular card doesn’t have a Dual DVI setup the back of the box showed us that the model is available.
As usual we have a great looking card form HIS which utilizes a clock speed of 500/500 on the core and the memory. So before we even begin comparing these cards, we can see that the HIS card has a 14MHz increase core clock speed over the PowerColor card, but will it make any difference?
