During the last year we have finally seen
games that can both harness the rendering speed of the fastest
video cards, but also can create some of the most beautiful detail
possible so far. Thus there has been a demand for video
cards that can provide both good frame rates and good image detail
in games such as Half Life 2, Doom 3, and Far Cry among others.
HIS or Hightech Information System Limited,
is one of ATi's launch partners and as such has access to the
newest GPU's and board designs from ATi before others do.
However they also provide cards that ATi themselves do not include,
most notably their ViVo line of ATi cards and their Dual DVI cards.
The X700 based video cards are ATi's current
mid-range PCI-E video cards, with no real comparable video card
in a AGP version. As is standard for ATi, the X700 is a
pure PCI-E video card, there is no bridge like nVidia has used.
HIS X700Pro IceQ Turbo VIVO 256MB PCIe
Before I go any further I would like to say
that this is one of the longest names for a video card that is
almost purely a descriptive one. If you would like to see
the full specs on this card
look here, however we will cover most of these points in the
review. Being the first HIS card I've had, what does the
box hold, does it have lots of extras or not? Lets take
a look at a few pictures to see.
Now for a list of what comes
with the card:
- The Video card
- Users Guide
- SVHS/RCA in/out cable
- SVHS - RCA converter
- Component Adaptor
- DVI-VGA Adaptor
- Ulead VideoStudio 7SE
- Counter Strike: Condition Zero
- Power DVD 5
- 3D-Album Picture Pro
- 3 HIS CD's
I think that about covers what came in the
box. To say the least HIS has included quite a bit of software
that is both useful and pretty up to date. For the video
editing portion of the card we have VideoStudio, Power DVD 5 for
playing DVD's, and a game in the way of Condition Zero.
The hardware accessories are nothing to ignore
either, as HIS has put the component adaptor into this card, something
I've been looking for, for quite a while. The standard DVI-VGA
connector was included which is good to see, as is a SVHS cable
and SVHS-RCA converter which isn't necessarily needed in this
case.
The card itself is dominated
by the IceQ cooling system which basically covers the entire
front of the card, unlike the one we saw with the PCX5750 card
we reviewed earlier, which itself was fairly large. One
thing that I like about this card is the way that it connects
to the board, a plate on the back with two screws and a holding
arm which is pretty easy to allow access to the heatsink.
Overclocking
Overclocking, something that is almost catered
to in the enthusiast community, since getting a speed boost for
a little bit of time and patience, and maybe a little money, is
usually worth it. Video cards are no exception so lets see
what this card does to make that situation easier.
What was nice to see is as
soon as we removed the heatsink from the card, we saw that HIS
had decided to use basically a perfect amount of thermal paste,
instead of the bog standard thermal pad many cards have.
The memory is covered using thermal pads and a heatsink, so
we didn't get a chance to see what the memory type is.
One interesting thing we noticed is that the GPU is not a X700
Pro as HIS is selling it as, but rather it is a X700 XT GPU
of which cards we haven't seen much/any of to this point.
The heatsink itself is very big, and takes up an extra slot
beside the video card, which I don't like very much, unless
it also leads to quieter operation. Does it succeed in
this area, lets see.
|
Video Card
|
MSI FX5900U
- VTD (Front Fan) |
MSI FX5900U
- VTD (Both Fans) |
HIS X700 Pro
IceQ Turbo |
ATi Radeon 9800XT |
Albatron Trinity
PCX5750 |
|
Sound Level (dBA):
|
51/56 (L/H) |
55/63 (L/H) |
<50 |
50/64 |
66 |
This card is nearly silent,
as HIS proudly states on its box. As for 20dBA I wouldn't
be able to tell you but it is able to keep below 50dBA from
about 2" away from the fan, which makes it the quietest
cooling system I've tested. But can something this quiet
overclock very well?
We can see that this card does
pretty well, making it up to the 492/492MHz mark, up from the
425/430MHz that it was at stock speeds. This is also a 32/22MHz
overclock over the HIS sanctioned iTurbo clock speeds that you
can use. However we weren't quite able to reach X700XT memory
speeds, though we beat the core speed by 17MHz. We will
see later on how much this will help the performance of this card.
Software
We will now take a quick look
at the software included by HIS in the package.
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- This CD contains just the standard
drivers from ATi, which includes the WDM drivers, Hydravision,
among the other parts of the drivers.
|
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- Video Studio 7SE is one of the better
basic video editing programs, at least in my opinion.
The good thing is that you can use this to upgrade to
the higher end software if you so choose to.
|
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- This DVD contains most of the recent
ATi tech demos as well as a demo of Dungeon Siege II.
It also has the complete full version of Dungeon Siege
on the DVD.
|
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- This is one of the two main DVD players
out there, the other being WinDVD. The good news
is that it is the full version of the program and works
very well. The bad news is that it is only the
2 speaker version so you will have to pay for the 6
speaker upgrade.
|
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- This CD oddly enough only contains
the iTurbo overclocking software. This could easily
have been included on the driver CD as both don't need
the entire CD or even close to it.
|
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- This program is quite interesting,
as it allows you to do some interesting things with
your images, from screensavers, to video, etc.
Quite an interesting program to play with.
|
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- This two CD set provides you with the
game Counter Strike: Condition Zero, for all you CS
addicts. It is based on the same engine that Half
Life 2 is based on, so graphics are among the best.
|
Quite a nice bundle HIS has included as
all the CD's are useful for one thing or another. I feel
that they wasted a CD on the iTurbo software as it really could
be fit on the same CD as the drivers with plenty of space left
over.
NEXT
