Test Environment

The MVKTech test rig we are using for this review is none other than our DFI LANParty SLI-DR, Thermaltake Armor sponsored AMD platform guinea pig. Hehe, the system will use the following hardware provided by the manufacturers for all our reviews at MVKTech.

• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Winchester
• DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR
• 1 x HIS X800 GT IceQ II Turbo
• 1 x 120GB Maxtor SATA HDD
• ATI CATALYST 5.9 (Latest Download)
• 1 x LG 16X DVDRW Multi-format
• 2048MB Mushkin DDR400 Redline
• Swiftech TEC Water Cooling Kit
• Thermaltake 480 watt TWV
• Thermaltake Armor Case (Courtesy of Xoxide)

This test bed has receives a lot of use and is our primary testing platform at MVKTech. When we test VPU/GPU's, we use rigs that are in production and used daily, so you get a better idea of performance under a typical configured home used computer, we leave all our processes running and do not super tweak the platform to yield scores that might only happen with this test bed. So to keep things into perspective we would rather give real world results that press for the ultimate out of spec operation.

This card looks kick ass in our system and we really like the fact we do not have to run external power to the HIS X800 GTO IceQ II Turbo. This free's up wire clutter and allows that much more PSU headroom for other tasks. The X800 GTO is now stuffed and in place. I will go ahead and install the drivers and get to the bottom of things.

Here we can see the HIS X800 GTO IceQ II Turbo is occupying the top PCIe slot and our rig is configured for single mode operations. Once again this card is a dual slot design and we can see the second PCIe slot just under the Radeon X800 GTO. I left the two expansion slots open so we can reconfigure our system after this review.

One last shot of the system before we reboot and hit up some synthetic tests and see what this GTO can muster. We will test using Futuremark and Aquamark benchmark utilities and stack up some game titles that we used with the GT version of this card a couple months back.