Overclocker Cafe - H.I.S. X850XT

H.I.S. Radeon X850XT PCI-Express

Manufacturer: Hightech Information Systems
Supplied by: Hightech Information Systems
Price: TBA

by Brian Tiller (2/25/2005)

Introduction

Hightech Information Systems has been in the VGA market for quite some time and recently they have taken the enthusiast world by storm with some very high quality graphics cards. We have reviewed several here and have always been impressed with Hightech's innovation, packaging and pricing strategy. Today, we get a chance to take a look at a couple of the top notch cards based on ATi's award winning X850XT VPU. I was a bit surprised when I saw that HIS was producing not only the X850XT but one with their IceQ cooling solution.

The cooling wasn't the only difference either. One of the cards is their Dual DVI VIVO edition which will support two TFT monitors. The IceQ II edition that they sent over will support one VGA and one DVI. Another difference is the core and memory speeds that are bumped up some with the more aggressive cooling. Let's take a look at the rest of the specs to check out any more differences before we get started.

Specifications:

HIS X850XT Dual DVI VIVO	HIS X850XT IceQ II
GPU Core: ATI R480 (X850XT) Memory: 256MB GDDR3 Core Speed: 520MHz Memory Speed: 1080MHz Dual Integrated Display Controllers Dual DVI and VIVO 16 Parallel pixel pipelines 6 Vertex shader engines Smartshader HD Smoothvision HD 400MHz Dual integrated RAMDACs PCI-Express Bus Interface TV-Out Video In HDTV ATi Rage Theatre	GPU Core: ATI R480 (X850XT) Memory: 256MB GDDR3 Core Speed: 540MHz Memory Speed: 1180MHz Dual Integrated Display Controllers Available with optional Dual DVI and VIVO 16 Parallel pixel pipelines 6 Vertex shader engines Smartshader HD Smoothvision HD 400MHz Dual integrated RAMDACs PCI-Express Bus Interface TV-Out Video In HDTV iTurbo Function

What you get:

Besides the driver disc and manual, each card comes with a bucket full of cables including a VIVO cable, HDTV cable, S-Video cable, and the 4-pin Molex to 6-pin power adapter cable. The Dual DVI card also contained two DVI-to VGA adapters versus the one that came with the IceQ edition.

The cards also come bundled with an all-in-one CD containing Dungeon Siege, Power Director 3 SE, 3D Album Picture Pro, Media Show 3, and Power 2Go 4. The Dual DVI-VIVO card also came with a copy of Power DVD 5 and the IceQ II card had the iTurbo overclocking software with it.