Pulling the cooling assembly apart we get a clear view of the attention to detail that HIS has put into their IceQ3 cooler.  Right down to the silver thermal paste used as its interface material between the GPU and cooler itself.  The copper cooling assembly is truly impressive.  The copper sinks on the GPU are physically separated from those on the memory.  This helps focus the cooling power on the GPU without any other factors working at cross purposes.  Too bad the memory is relegated to having only passive cooling.

Looking closer at the GPU cooler, we see what looks remarkably similar to something on many processors; large amounts of surface area, copper thin fins and a heatpipe.  HIS remarks that their heatpipe has a ‘sintered powder wick’ at its core.  The wick is central to any heatpipe design and anything that can assist in how rapidly thermal energy is transferred is welcomed indeed.  Thermal goo and thermal pads employed by the GPU and memory respectively, keep them in good contact with the cooling assembly.  The lap job on the coolers looks quite adequate and up to task.

The reasoning for all the cooling attention provided by HIS’s IceQ3 cooler is three fold.  Not only does it cool better and more quietly than the reference design's less robust cooler but the extra cooling umph is needed since this card is one of HIS’s ‘Turbo’ models.  The Turbo model comes overclocked right off the assembly line.  Overclocked with a warranty can never be bad.  While the overclock isn’t excessive, the 520MHz on the core over the standard 500MHz reference spec is enough to give HIS an edge over the rest of the midrange competition.

Performance

The Radeon X1800 GTO as we have already said is designed for the midrange VGA wars.  While the current NVidia midrange product in this league is the GeForce 7600; the only midrange card we have in the shop right now for comparison is an Albatron GeForce 6600 GT.  While this comparison card is a bit dated it should still give you a good idea of what you can expect for your upgrade dollar and some perspective on the performance of the HIS X1800 GTO IceQ3 Turbo. 

Testing will be from a real world standpoint with frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program and graphed in a three minute segment of play from Battlefield 2, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Half Life 2 and Quake 4.  Within each game, we have saved spots where we can record actual gameplay from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products.  Specific settings will differ somewhat between each game but all will be at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768.