HIS Radeon X1950XT IceQ3 Turbo

Manufacturer: Hightech Information System
Supplied by: Hightech Information System
Street Price: $290.00

by Dean Barker  (12/27/2006)

Introduction

The division between low, middle and the high end video cards is murky at best.  You have a true spectrum of products on the market that offer performance and price to fit most anyone's needs.  The trouble is, that with the blurring of the lines it is often hard to decide "should I spend another $40 and get a ...?"  That's the question that typically crosses my mind. 

ATi's Radeon line offers lots of possibilities that are enriched further by HIS and their IceQ3 coolers and factory overclocked cards (Turbo).  The big winners at the moment for the best bang for the buck are the GeForce 7900 GS and the Radeon X1950 Pro.  Both cards offer gobs of performance at a reasonable price.  But what about the Radeon X1950XT for 'just that little bit more'?  What can you expect for your pixel popping dollar?  The people at Hightech Information System have set us up with one of their X1950XT cards in their IceQ3 and Turbo trim to attempt and address that very question.

The other brother

The best place to start is to look at exactly how does the X1950XT separates itself from its little brother and its even faster X1950XTX sibling.  The X1950XT is based on the R580 core as is the XTX version.  This means 16 pixel pipelines instead of the 12 found on the X1950 Pro.  Actually, the XT is very much like the XTX version except for the XTX's no holds barred GDDR4 memory where the rest of the Radeon line carries the GDDR3.  The HIS Turbo version of the X1950XT even boosts a core clock speed of 650MHz identical to that of the XTX but at a significantly lower price.  Instead of listing out our test card's specs, we are going to do a little copy/paste action from HIS's website showing the differences between the X1950XT IceQ3 Turbo we have on the bench today and the X1950XTX, the vanilla X1950XT and the X1950 Pro.

Specs and more

Model Name	HIS X1950XT IceQ3 Turbo Dual DL-DVI VIVO 256MB GDDR3	HIS X1950XTX Dual DL-DVI VIVO 512MB GDDR4	HIS X1950Pro IceQ3 Turbo Dual DL-DVI VIVO 256MB GDDR3	HIS X1950XT Dual DL-DVI VIVO 256MB GDDR3
Chipset	Radeon X1950 PCIe Series	Radeon X1950 PCIe Series	Radeon X1950 PCIe Series	Radeon X1950 PCIe Series
ASIC	R580+	R580+	RV570	R580+
Pixel Pipelines	16	16	12	16
Vertex Engines	8	8	8	8
Manu. Process (Micron)	90nm	90nm		90nm
Memory Size(MB)	256	512	256	256
Memory Type	GDDR3	GDDR4	GDDR3	GDDR3
RAMDAC (MHz)	400 Dual	400 Dual	400 Dual	400 Dual
Engine CLK (MHz)	650	650	620 (Turbo)	625
Memory CLK (MHz)	1800	2000	1480	1800
Memory Interface (bit)	256	256	256	256
Memory Bandwidth	57.6GB/s	64GB/s	47.4GB	57.6GB/s
Maximum Resolution	2560x1600	2560x1600	2560x1600	2560x1600
Bus Interface	PCIe	PCIe	PCIe	PCIe
VGA	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
2nd VGA	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
DVI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
2nd DVI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
TV-out	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
HDTV (YPrPb component output)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Video-in	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
TV Tuner	No	No	No	No
FM Tuner	No	No	No	No

NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - What you get / The Card
Pg 3 - The Card / Performance
Pg 4 - Performance Graphs
Pg 5 - Image Quality / Overclocking / Conclusion