A couple of weeks ago Guru3D received an email from HiS technology with the request if they would like to review their new AGP8x based Radeon x850 XT and x850 XT Platinum Edition. Both products tested today come with the very chilly IceQ II cooling package that means a large but very silent cooler. For the standard Radeon x850 XT model additional iTurbo overclocking software is included, which makes the product run as fast as a Platinum Edition within the click of a mouse button, a very cool feature. They take it through a nice photo-shoot and multiple benchmarks with the best poosible settings. The result ? Yeah .. of course it"s sweet stuff. If you have the processor to juice it up though!
Also quite important for some excellent HDTV usage, a component 3-way RCA cable. Connect the card to a nice LCD or Plasma screen and you can play HDTV games or playback movies on that big screen. The cards themselves then. It"s quite hard to determine real changes at PCB level over the reference model as the cooler is blocking my view! I can tell you though that HiS is following reference design precisely. The trick however is faster memory and the cooling technology, which is called IceQ-II, which we"ll get into in a minute.Compared to the PCI-Express (PCX from now on) make note of the fact that these x850"s do not have dual-DVI. Finally a difference. You"ll get a VGA/CRT and DVI-I connector.