HIS Radeon X1950XT IceQ3 Turbo

The length side of the HIS cooler shows off its sintered wick heatpipe which increases the efficiency of the cooler even more.  The high count copper convection fins within the assembly provide boatloads of surface area to dissipate heat.  But only that heat from off the core.  The memory modules of the X1950XT IceQ3 are actually not physically connected to the rest of the cooler assembly.  This helps isolate hot elements so you don't have one heating the other. 

  

This card is a dual slot solution to accommodate the cooler.  Warm air is blown out of the rear of the case via the vent you see below.  Just under this are the dual DVI connections with a AVIVO port in between.

Before we move into testing, the thing that is not on this board is the CrossFire bridge posts that we saw on the X1950 Pro and X1650XT we recently reviewed.  These posts (as shown on the Pro here) effectively do away with the need of a Master CrossFire card be one of the two in a dual set up.  The X1950XT IceQ3 Turbo is CrossFire ready just CrossFire ready the old way.

Performance

Putting the card under fire will be done in real world conditions.  Testing will be real world gameplay frame rates as recorded by the FRAPS program.  Results are graphed in three minute segments from within Battlefield 2, Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Quake 4.  Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record gameplay from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products.  Screen resolution will be 1600 x 1200 pixels in each run with all other settings set to max with the exception of FSAA.  Full screen anti aliasing will be set to 0x in our testing.  Since the card's biggest competitor comes from its own ranks we are going to compare it to a HIS Radeon X1950 Pro IceQ3 Turbo (256MB) to see if this is worth that "little bit more" we mentioned earlier.

Test Bed

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (Clawhammer)

• Foxconn NF4SK8AA mainboard

• Thermaltake Mini Typhoon Cooler

• (2) 1024 MB DIMM of OCZ PC4000 Platinum GX XTC

• Maxtor DiamondMax 9 100GB SATA HDD

• Lite-On Dual Layer 16x DVD Burner

• Kingwin Absolute Power 600w PSU

• Windows XP Pro SP2

Results

Battlefield 2 is a well known gameplay benchmark.  Using the Zetar Wetlands map, we recorded a three minute segment of a play with both our test card and comparison products.  Let's see how they did.
 

Minimum Radeon X1950XT = 48 / Minimum Radeon X1950 Pro = 51
Maximum Radeon X1950XT = 93 / Maximum Radeon X1950 Pro = 95
Average Radeon X1950XT = 77 / Average Radeon X1950 Pro = 78

This is a bit of a surprise.  I did not expect to see neck and neck action between the Radeon 1950XT and 1950 Pro.  Let's move on and see if the trend continues in Quake 4.

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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