Under The Hood

Indeed at MVKTech we are taking a look under the hood by pulling of the IceQ II cooling solution. As you know by removing the cooling system you are voiding the warranty. We are starting by removing the packplate and by this uncovering the back of the HIS X800 GTO.

Once the backplate has been removed the full scale PCB sees the light. The rear retention bracket acts as a ram sink to provide cooling to the four memory chips on the back of the HIS X800 GTO. Of course the most important components are not located on the rear of the card but on the front.

A close-up on the back of the card shows that the blue impeller of the HIS X800 GTO IceQ II Turbo is actually covering more then just the card. Via this way the fan can grap air from the end of the card and push it through the copper heatsink and fin surface towards the outlet. This way the airflow will constantly remove the hot air out of the PC case.

A center shot at the back of the card show us where the GPU is making connection with the PCB. This is generally a point that is producing the most heat on the rear of the card. The IceQ cooling backplate is covering this and making sure the heat get's spead out. On the X800 GTO, HIS is using Samsung memory chips designed for 1.6ns or 1.2GHz operating speed.

Flipping the card around and taking off the IceQ II cooler we finally can provide you a view on the PCB and the components. Definatly a big difference with backside, the front is covered with lot's of electronic components soldered on the typical ATI red colored PCB. And what takes up the most space - the Radeon X800 GTO VPU and next to that we can see the remaining four Samsung memory chips. Featuring a total of eight memory chips (four on each side of the PCB) in which we get a total of 256MB.

As we mentioned already the HIS X800 GTO IceQ II Turbo comes with the ATI R480 core. The cores used for the Radeon X800 GTO vary from vendor to vendor and for the HIS card that we received, the R480 core seems to be the choice. This should be good news for overclockers, as the R480 core should have greater allowance for overclocking compared to the other cores. What's more, the use of R480 cores means that a 12-pipe GTO may well overclock to ATI Radeon X850 levels.