Under The Hood

At MVKTECH we pull off the IceQ II so you don't have too. Because if you did, you would in deed void the warranty. Peeling back the IceQ II cooling system we can take a peak and whats under the hood. So lets see whats up under this mainstream power house.

Removing the IceQ II is similar to removing any other IceQ II cooling system and just as easy with the X800 GT. For those who don't care about the warranty and want to see what’s under the hood, with proper handling the IceQ II can be removed for what ever reasons. We don't recommend it however. There is no reason to pull it off, HIS uses some of the best silver metallic thermal paste and uses one of the best naturally aspirated cooling systems available for a video card - IceQ II Turbo.

The clear blue impeller is housed in a ducted fan shroud that draws air from one side of the card. As mentioned HIS uses a silver thermal paste that reminds me a lot like Arctic Silver 5, having a heavy metalic content with the same texture and feel. HIS says it's a compound that works just as good as AS5. Also note the revised thermal pads that HIS is using. These pads offer superior heat transfers over previous configurations. About time manufacturers use premium thermal transfer medium on there video cards.

This is the rear retention bracket which also acts as a ram sink. You can see the square indentions that obviously show the orientation in which the retention slash ram sink is placed on the PCB of the X800 GT. Now that we peeled off the cooling system lets see what sits under the IceQ II cooling system.

The HIS X800 GT is powered by the ATI Radeon X800 series line of graphics processors. This basically means that ATI has let the different brands choose what they wanted to use to power their X800 GT cards. Each manufacturer could choose between the R423 or the R480 GPU chipset. As you might know, the R423 is the X800 series GPU and the R480 is the re-designed X850 series GPU. So what would HIS have choosen fo their X800 GT implemenation? 

Well what can we see, the HIS X800 GT is using the same R423/R480 core as the X850 series, no wonder this card packs a punch and is said to crunch the competition. The R423 core we have here, means serious mainstream performance. While only operating on 8 pixel pipelines we still get huge performance with this card that will certainly give the GeForce 6600 GT a run for his money.

Next to the graphics chipset that is used on the X800 GT it is also important to know what kind of memory is backing up it up. His has opted on the X800 GT IceQ II Turbo for Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20 memory chips which are rated at 2.0ns or 1000MHz operation speed. On the Turbo version HIS is exploiting the full potential of the memory and has clocked em at 1GHz (the non Turbo is only set at 980MHz).

Turning the card over also let's us see the back memory modules of the HIS X800 GT graphics card. So in total the HIS X800 GT IceQ II Turbo is equipped with 8 memory chips which gives a total of 256MB GDDR3 memory. The HIS Turbo edition guarantees a dramatic range of overclockable speed on your card. All IceQ II series come with both Turbo and non Turbo (standard) editions. The Turbo version is makred with the guaranteed overclocking speed in core and memory.