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HIS Radeon X1800 GTO IceQ3 Turbo 256MB Review |
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Written by Zombie
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Tuesday, 09 May 2006 |
VR-Zone published a review on the HIS Radeon X1800 GTO IceQ3 Turbo 256MB graphics card. HIS has made it's name well-known in the past with it's IceQ series of ATI graphics cards. From it's Radeon X800 series of graphics cards, we have seen the IceQ cooling on their cards evolve. IceQ cooling of HIS has advanced to the third stage and we will check out the HIS Radeon X1800 GTO IceQ3 and see what it offers in terms of improved cooling and evaluate the unlocking capability on this card. The Radeon X1800 GTO comes clocked at 512MHz core and 1GHz memory clock speed, set by HIS. This is a bit higher then the default speeds advised by ATI for the GTO.
 HIS Radeon X1800 GTO IceQ3 Turbo 256MB Review
With default voltages and fan speed left at the silent default speed, I managed to overclock the card to 580MHz core and 1180MHz memory speed, which is a 13% boost in performance. To push it all the way to the top, I increased voltages and tuned up fan speed all the way. The fan is quite audible at this speed, but it's not really irritating as it is more of a whoosh than a whine sound. The sweet spot for the voltages with the default cooler spinning at maximum speed is 1.4V core and 2.15V memory. I hit a stable speed of 730/1460MHz with this. That boosted performance by a big margin, 37% over the default.
I tried to unlock the card by flashing a Radeon X1800 XL BIOS onto the GTO card. I successfully unlocked the HIS Radeon X1800 GTO to 16 pipelines with a flash with the Sapphire Radeon X1800 XL BIOS. We can see that the performance is boosted by 8% with the additional 4 pipelines, even though the Radeon X1800 XL core speed is 20MHz slower. There was a drawback that came with the unlocking however. I could only hit 563MHz core and 1200MHz memory after the unlock, but that was with default voltages and fan left at default speed. More voltage and faster fan speed did not help the overclock.
The HIS Radeon X1800 GTO IceQ3 impressed us with it's overclockability and it's modability when it comes to unlocking the 4 extra pipelines buried within that R520 core on the card. The card I have unlocked flawlessly and I have heard quite a few owners of the same card reporting the same results. The low-side to that is the drop in overclocking ability after the unlock. The performance boost was not as much as what I've encountered with the unlocking of the Radeon X800 PRO to a Radeon X800 XT back in those days. Although running at 16 pipes instead of 12 show a big advantage on the performance.
Still, the card at stock is a winner over the GeForce 7600 GT from NVIDIA, and with it priced at $273, it does fill the gap between the GeForce 7600 GT and GeForce 7900 GT, both in terms of price and in terms of performance. If you have exactly $270 to spend, which is $50 short of buying a GeForce 7900 GT and $40 in excess of a GeForce 7600 GT, this card is defintely a great choice. The IceQ3 cooling on the card performs as good as it looks and this is one of the only cards around you would not need a change in cooler even after some manipulative increase in voltages.
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