HIS X1800GTO - The Card

We had a quick peak at the HIS graphics card from the rear of the box but its time to get all that packaging out the way and have a real good look at just what we have on our hands today.

If you don't pay too much attention, the cooler looks like the standard Arctic Cooling cooler which we have seen on a number of HIS cards. It's not until you pay a bit more attention that you can see some changes to the cooler dubbed IceQ 3. These changes are the result of a lot of work by HIS over in Hong Kong over the past year.

The model sent into us for review by HIS is their "Turbo" edition which means you can overclock the card if you need some extra FPS. While not as impressive as other cards we have received from HIS in the past, you are able to boost the clock speed by 20MHz to 520MHz although the memory clock speeds stays the same, 500MHz (or 1GHz DDR). It does seem like the Radeon X1800GTO is already pretty maxed out as far as clock speeds go so don't expect too much when it comes to overclocking.

Where the GeCube X1900GT had a red heatsink at the rear of the card, we can see that HIS have a copper version just underneath the fan. We also have the regular 6-pin PCI Express connector since the motherboard alone is not able to provide enough adequate power for the card.

Here we can see the main changes to the IceQ heatsink. Not only are we using copper but heat pipe technology as well to help dissipate even more efficiently. Most companies are turning to heat pipe cooling, so it was only a matter of time till we saw it on a HIS graphics card.

The front of the card gives us two Dual Link DVI ports and our S-Video like port. We also have the big gap for the air to exit and if you choose to install the filter like panel over the top, it sits over this gap.

Moving to the back of the card it is a similar picture to what we saw on our GeCube X1900GT with a bracket to hold the heatsink in place and a whole bunch of stickers.