HIS brings us a highly overclocked Radeon X1950 PRO based video card with custom cooling for the AGP platform. The AGP platform was declared dead quite some time ago now, but we all know that the majority of PC users still have a motherboard with AGP slot. Only a small minority keeps up with the hectic PC upgrade cycle and so it makes sense that companies are releasing new products for AGP. For quite some time NVIDIA dominated the AGP scene with their GeForce 7800 GS based AGP graphics card, originally available at a discouraging €300 price tag. With the Radeon X1950 PRO we expect to see a significant boost of the gaming performance. - Madshrimps

HIS Radeon X1950 PRO IceQ3 512MB Edition Review

HIS has been known for years now to provide custom cooled video cards based on ATI GPU's, their Radeon X1950 PRO is no different, their IceQ3 keeps the GPU cool and quiet, and even allows them enough headroom to ship the card with the highest out of the box clocks speed. The IceQ3 version from HIS is running at overclocked speeds only reached by a select amount of Radeon X1950 PRO cards; they must be hand picked. With 512MB the card has head room to run games at higher resolutions. But what can make you buy a new €200 video card for your aging system?

The AGP version is very similar to the PCI Express edition, with of course the obvious difference in connection bridges, there are small differences with the location of components like the 6-pin power adapter and fan header; the AGP version lacks the CrossFire connectors visible on the PCI Express version. Cooling wise both cards use the same heatsink, but the AGP version has a double slot metal bracket, compared to seperate one of the PCI Express. The GPU and memory are cooled by a copper heatsink, a fan near the end of the video card.

Since the release of the Radeon X1950 PRO chip we've been waiting for an updated ATITool to help us in our overclocking endeavors. We resorted to othermeans which provided to change the GPU speeds a little bit, but not by much, going to about 634MHz did yield a small increase but ultimately did not prove stable enough to complete the whole benchmark suite. HIS really pushed this chip to the limit, even 620MHz is beyond what most get out of their Radeon X1950 PRO graphics card. Memory overclocking simply did not work, again at 1480MHz HIS is running the memory near maximum limit.

The Radeon X1950 PRO chipset from ATI breathes new lives into AGP systems, HIS' version is the highest overclocked version on sale right now, and this for a reasonable €200 which is on par with the PCI Express version. Whether or not it's a wise choice to invest in a video card based on a no longer actively support platform depends on your current system and what you expect to do with it the coming months. We applaud HIS for their continued support for the aging AGP platform with their latest product, the Radeon X1950 PRO IceQ3 gives you a lot bang for the buck.