Pump up the volume

One of the disks in the bundle had HIS's overclocking tool.  For exploring the limits of the card the ATi Tool is superior however, the HIS Tool gives you some control over other functions.  VPU speed can be manually adjusted from 519MHz to 540MHz and the memory speed can be adjust between 1080MHz and 1190MHz.  Clicking the iTurbo button in the lower left side shifts things from 'Silence' mode 520/1080MHz - 13% fan power to Turbo mode 540/1180MHz - 100% fan power.  The fan speed can also be manually adjusted from here as well.  To be honest, I could hardly detect the sound difference between 'silence' and 'turbo' mode.

Performance

As we always make every effort to give you some useful perspective by using a comparison product, we unfortunately did not have a 256mb NVidia GeForce 6800 in the shop at the time of this writing.  We did however, have a standard 128mb GeForce 6800 card on the shelf.  All benches are run in 16 bit color in 'speed' settings unless otherwise indicated. 

Our test suite includes Far Cry, Half Life 2 and Doom 3 today with multiple demos to see how well the HIS X850XT iTurbo gets the pixels to the pavement.  The first set of benches is with minimal details enabled and 0xFSAA and 0xAF.  The second set of benches focuses on the performance hit taken with some eye candy enabled; 4xFSAA and 8xAF to be exact.  Finally, the last set is a comparison of the X850XT iTurbo's performance between 4xFSAA/8xAF and 6xFSAA/16xAF enabled.  The most current drivers and game patches as of the date of this writing were installed.  The forthcoming results were obtained by running each product in each bench five times.  The highest and lowest scores were thrown out with the remaining three averaged and graphed.

Test Bed

• Intel 2.4GHz Pentium 4 ‘C’ chip @ 3.2GHz / 1.75 volts

• ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe mainboard

• Corsair TwinX 1024 XMS4400 DDR

• Seagate 120gb SATA HDD

• Windows XP Pro with all patches and SP2 installed

• Ultra X-Connect 500w PSU

• Generic DVD-RW