Image Quality

Visually, the Radeon X1800 GTO does very well.  Below are screen shots of varying levels of antialaising and anisotropic filtering.  You can see the differences best by focusing on the red deck in the top most right corner of each pic.  All are taken at 1600 x 1200 resolution.  Details from left to right - 6x FSAA / 16x AF, 4x FSAA / 8x AF, 2x FSAA / 4x AF and the last being 0x FSAA / Trilinear filtering.  With the eye candy maxed, the vista was fantastic!

Overclocking

The Radeon X1800 GTO is notable in two ways of squeezing more out of it.  The first being the good old fashioned way of bumping up the core and memory frequency.  The HIS card comes hardware overclocked out of the factory at 520MHz as opposed to the 500MHz seen on vanilla versions of the same card.  The memory speed was reference design set of 1000MHz.  Using the Catalyst driver control panel, we bumped things up by hand until the system began to show problems with image tearing and other visual abnormalities associated with too high a clock.  With all the IceQ3's cooling potential we had high expectations.  Unfortunately, they weren't fulfilled.  A maximum stable overclock on the core turned out to be 533MHz while the memory yielded only 1062MHz.  Benchmarking a couple of our games again showed an insignificant increase in frame rates during gameplay.

The lack of overclocking headroom was not a complete buzz kill however.  The second and most notable way of milking some more power out of the GTO is by flashing the BIOS with a X1800XL BIOS.  The card indeed has 16 pipelines but four are turned off to meet the GTOs standard spec of 12 pipelines.  A simple BIOS flash using a utility such as ATi's WinFlash and the right BIOS has seen LOTS of success elsewhere.  I was in the process of flashing our card when I decided to hold off as I want to do a head to head with the GTO and the GeForce 7600 in the next few weeks.  However, the ability to flash open four extra pixel pipelines is a HUGE selling point for the card.  HUGE!

Conclusion

HIS has taken a very sound and successful base in the Radeon X1800 GTO and made it even better.  The IceQ3 cooler aside from its killer aesthetics, operated at near silence under load.  Performance wise, frame rates blew the doors off a one generation old midrange card which really demonstrates that the increase in technology seen on current VGA cards is not just marketing hype.  It is real world frames per second performance that provides speed and just as importantly, a very high level of quality in the images it renders.  Add in the ability to BIOS flash this 12 pipeline card to have a full 16 pipes, adds bang for the buck value I can't even begin to put a price on.

The flip side is a short list.  The most irritating concern was the length of the card.  Most high end cards are nine inches long as is the HIS X1800 GTO.  So this isn't a slam but rather the end user needs pay particular attention to ensure that their case can handle a card of this length.  Overclocking wasn't spectacular as we expected it would be but this is offset but the BIOS flash option we keep harped on.  Compared to the vanilla X1800 GTO cards from other manufacturers that don't stray from the reference design, the HIS card is priced about $50 higher.  However, that extra $50 gets you a card that's hardware overclocked, has a near silent copper heatpipe cooler and a cable bundle to make any HTPC-phile very pleased.  By the way, did I mention that this card is CrossFire ready?  HIS has done their homework on this one and offers a card to the masses seeking top dollar frag at a reasonable price.