If you have ever been in the market for a graphics card, you are undoubtedly familiar with the constantly changing graphics card market. About every 8-10 months, some new GPU's are introduced by NVIDIA and ATI, and after their introduction, dozens of graphics cards built by their add in board partners come to market. Because these add in board partners all use the same graphics chips supplied by the two major graphics card companies, they have to use their marketing savvy to create extra value and incentive for consumers to buy their products. Over the years we've seen companies bundle the hottest new games, add video connections, cooling units and even colored PCB's. - HotHardware

HIS Radeon HD 2600 PRO IceQ 512MB Turbo Review

Upon initial inspection, one of the first things you'll notice is the fact that HIS has kept true to their IceQ Turbo line of cards and added a large, two slot, UV reflective, Arctic Cooling heatsink to their Radeon HD 2600 PRO card. The card uses HIS' unique teal colored PCB and even has black colored DVI connectors with gold plating. When we take a look at the card's on-board 512MB of GDDR2 memory, we can see that the huge heatsink actually doesn’t cover any of the onboard memory chips, just the card's GPU. And there is no external power source needed with the Radeon HD 2600 series.

It's important to note that the HIS Radeon HD 2600 PRO IceQ Turbo has 512MB of GDDR2 memory, double that of ATI's reference design. It's also good to note the price difference between the cards. The reference design Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB of memory sells for about $90-95 while the HIS Radeon HD 2600 PRO IceQ Turbo with 512MB of memory is currently priced at around $130. And on another side note, neither the reference nor the HIS Radeon HD 2600 PRO cards come with CrossFire connectors. Most of ATI's add in board partners only include CrossFire on their Radeon HD 2600 XT cards.

Before we start to talk about our overclocking experience with the card, it's important to note that the IceQ Turbo version is factory overclocked right out of the box. The card ships with a core clock speed of 650MHz, up from the 600MHz reference clock, and with a memory clock speed of 1050MHz, up from a reference speed of 1000MHz. Our magic core clock number turned out to be 740MHz, and with the same process, we found our optimal memory overclock frequency to be 1190MHz effective. To ensure that the card was stable, we ran gaming tests on the card over night.

Although the IceQ Turbo line has been very successful for HIS, bringing its features to the Radeon HD 2600 PRO might have taken things a step too far. Although we were able to use the IceQ cooler to significantly overclock the card, the results still put it behind the stock GeForce 8600 GT. Although the heatsink is very quiet, the HIS Radeon HD 2600 PRO IceQ Turbo is a hard sell to any gamer looking for solid performance. The card uses a two slot GPU cooler, is more expensive, and yet slower than the GeForce 8600 GT graphics card. So although it comes close it isn't a winner in our eyes.

Well, it is nice that HIS is including Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, but those two games are now available to anyone with an ATI graphics card. The Radeon HD 2600 series are being targeted to more mainstream users with a distinct multimedia focus, but it seems as though HIS is trying to stretch the target audience to gamers and enthusiasts on a budget, and unfortunately, the HIS Radeon HD 2600 PRO IceQ Turbo doesn't offer the best value to users in these groups.