As we mentioned, the great advantage of this model from HIS is its cooler. HIS produces two Radeon X800 GTO IceQ II models, HX80GOQ256-3TOE and HX80GOQT256-3TOE (a.k.a. ”Turbo“). This second model comes with an overclocking utility that puts the graphics chip running at 500 MHz. Even thought that was the model we’ve got for reviewing, we didn’t enable its overclocking feature.

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Figure 2: HIS Radeon X800 GTO IceQ II.

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Figure 3: HIS Radeon X800 GTO IceQ II, back view.

We disassembled the video card heatsink to take a look, see Figure 4. As you can see, it is made of copper.

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Figure 4: IceQ II cooler detached from the video card.

This video card uses 1.6 ns GDDR3 memory chips from Samsung, which can run up to 1.2 GHz, according to the manufacturer. Since this video card accesses the memory at 1 GHz, there is an amazing 20% headroom for overclocking the memory still inside the memory’s specs. Of course you can even try overclock it over its specs.

This video card has one VGA connector and one DVI connector, allowing you to use two video monitors on your PC. The board comes with one DVI-to-VGA adapter, so you can transform this DVI output into standard VGA.

In Figure 5, you can see all cables and adapters that come with this video card.

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Figure 5: Cables and adapters that come with HIS Radeon X800 GTO IceQ II.

This video card comes with several games, two in full version (Flat Out and Dragon Siege 1.1), five demos (RollerCoster Tycoon 3, Half-Life 2, Act of War: Direct Action, Tribes: Vengeance and Axis & Allies) and one trial (Guild Wars 10-hour trial).

Before going to our benchmarking results, let’s recap this video card main features.