ATI
have had it quite rough lately in the eyes of the enthusiast press.
Crossfire has only recently begun to make a real showing and it’s
still not a big showing. Trailing the mature SLI and experiencing
similar teething troubles as well it hasn’t looked good.
It’s not all bad though, as the X1900XT is a good card and
is arguably top of the game, even against the 7800 series from
NVIDIA.
One
area that ATI has done well in is the midrange area, although
this has been in the latter generation with the X800GT and X800GTO
cards; cards that are quite cheap and yet can mostly give near
to 6800GT levels of performance when overclocked. Some have even
seen X800XL levels of performance out of the box. Of course that
was then and this is now, and now ATI’s midrange series
has been updated with the X1600 series, to which manufacturers
have been making cards based on these GPU’s.
We’ve
often looked at HIS
products and I can’t honestly think of one that has been
bad. Infact the majority have been very good packages, and I can’t
see this changing with the current generation. Which of course
brings us to the point of this article; a review of the new HIS
X1600XT IceQ Turbo Edition PCI Express graphics card. The jump
from the previous generation to this one has brought with it support
for ShaderModel 3.0 and ATI’s new AVIVO technology as well
as more support for Crossfire, to which this HIS X1600XT supports
all the above. Let’s get a closer look.
Specifications
•
Powered by ATI Radeon X1600XT - 587MHz
• 256MB-128bit 4 channel GDDR3 memory - 1.38GHz
• 12 Pixel shader processor
• 5 Vertex shader processor
• 8 Geometry Pipelines
• Ultra-threaded SM 3.0 Engine
• 256-bit Ring-bus
• ATI Avivo™
• High Precision Architecture
• CrossFire™ Support
• PCI Express® x16 lane native support
The
box for the X1600XT IceQ Turbo Edition is the usual HIS fair,
although usual and HIS packaging probably shouldn’t be
used in the same sentence. HIS always include plenty of information,
and not just marketing gab either, but actual real info such
as clock speeds, features and technical specifications such
as how many pixel pipelines the card uses. You always get a
good first impression from HIS and things are no different here.
Opening
the box you can see instantly the large IceQ cooler that sports
the top of the card. Inside the interior box, everything you
get is neatly packaged inside a clear plastic tray. The extras
include a component video out cable, S-Video cable (1m) S-Video
to composite adapter cable, two DVI to VGA adapters and a grill
for a PC slot on your case for the IceQ cooler exhaust.
Also
included is a very nice manual which explains everything about
how to set up the card, it’s features, TV out etc, and
of course software CD’s; four of them. The CD’s
included have 3D Album Picture Pro, Power2Go, PowerDirectorSE+
and the games Flatout and Dungeon Siege. Trials of other programs
are also included and of course there is a driver disk and the
iTurbo software disk. The games are starting to get on a bit,
but since this is a mid range card, there is little sense putting
in the latest heavy duty action hit.
Moving
on to the card itself, you can see that the top is dominated by
the UV reactive IceQ cooler which takes up a second slot, draws
air in from the case, and then exhausts the hot air out of the
rear of the case. The card’s ram is cooled by the these
rather nice aluminium ramsinks, the same material as used by the
coolers heatsink.
It’s
something that HIS have been doing for a while now, but it is
worth pointing out that HIS also sleeve the cabling that powers
the fan, and tucks it away neatly against the cooler.
The
back of the card is completely uneventful, although you can
see that the IceQ cooler does overhang the card itself slightly
(although this isn’t an issue of any kind, just pointing
it out for the sake of a complete review).
The
IO panel sports two DVI ports; no D-SUB’s here, but of course
you do get two DVI to VGA adapters so dual monitors in any configuration
is possible. In between the two DVI ports is a TV out DIN style
port.
Once
again, HIS have a card that looks and feels to be solidly built
and with a heavy dose of quality.
Test
Setup
Albatron
PX925X Pro, Intel Pentium 4 520 (3.2GHz), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX
PC2-5400 (4-4-4-12), 2x 80GB Maxtor 7200 SATA's, Windows XP w/SP2
We'll
be using FRAPS to record framerates in all our tests, playing
the game as anybody would (trying to stay alive), firing weapons,
dodging attacks and so on. Unlike our past video game tests, all
benchmarks will be done with the audio "on", as we're
trying to illustrate real gaming experiences, and I doubt any
of our readers mute the audio during gameplay. An X800GTO will
be used to compare the previous generation with this one and a
Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW 20" Widescreen LCD will be used for
display (hence the widescreen resolutions chosen for some games).
Test
Software will be:
Doom
3 - Making good use of the BFG, rocket launcher and plasma
gun (the most graphically intense weapons), we'll be kicking ass
on the Caverns Area 1 level, specifically the part right after
reaching the bottom in the cargo lift.
Half
Life 2: Lost Coast – A short 10 minute game demo utilizing
HDR in the Source engine, Lost Coast requires you to have a recent
card to see all the visual goodness. Starting at the bottom of
the stairs, we worked our way up to the chapel above, shooting
the combine on the way and admiring the view.
F.E.A.R.
– Certainly not the prettiest game in the bunch used here,
but if you want a good scare then this game can provide it. The
lighting and shadows (if you have a machine capable of it) all
add to the atmosphere. We ran around part of interval 03, after
escaping the fire in the warehouse.
Battlefield
2 - We tested the gameplay on the Songhua Stalemate map with
15 bots. This map features a lot of greenery and water areas,
as well as lots of hills and buildings which makes the fighting
tight and the views expansive, all of which gives your graphics
card a challenge.
Need
for Speed: Most Wanted – NFS: MW features a lot of
particle effects and reflective surfaces, along with an HDR filtering
effect that provides some very nice visuals. We tricked a Lamborghini
Murciélago and went for a blast around town avoiding the
traffic and police.
The
driver settings were manually configured for Anti-aliasing and
Anisotropic Filtering (on or off), and set to "Quality".
All games were set to their highest playable game settings for
best possible image quality unless otherwise stated.
Since
this is a HIS Turbo Edition card, you can install the included
iTurbo software for an under warrantee overclock which will take
your card speed from 587/1386 to 600/1404. Since this is a relatively
small overclock, is under warrantee by HIS and has little affect
on temperatures/noise, we will be running our tests using the
overclocked settings only.
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