Then there is the cooling, I must admit I was a bit skeptical about that huge cooling solution. But I have to look at the facts here, the card overclocked really well. With all respect, the design is a little bit based on NVIDIA's FlowFX or ABIT's OTES. That's okay, because the idea behind it I always did like. The big disadvantage over conventional cooling is that heat is being dumped inside your case. The ambient temperature of all your components in the case will heat up, your graphics card can literary smuttier up in it's own heat. DHES in this case tries to catch and manage that heat, once caught up in the pipeline for the bigger part that heat will be dumped outside your PC case. Combine that with the fact that it's really silent and not at all bad looking. it's a classic winning combo in my eyes. I love it. The big downside if of course it's site. You will loose the PCI slot below your graphics card. About noise, during the entire test we had the switch (on the backside of the card) at high. Noise was still below your average fan and not at all loud.

Overclocking was a real joy to do with this card. I loved to see it run beyond 9800 XT performance. We got the card up-to 450 MHZ on the core, yet it started showing very tiny artifacts so we found the threshold of the limit. It's quite amazing that a 0.15 micron process graphics core can do such a high frequency. Be backed down 18 MHz and the card was perfectly stable at 432 MHz. Memory was the same story, we where able to run it at Radeon 9800XT performance. We got it up-to 2x380 stable, at 400 MHz we spotted a little artifacts in the form of snow. Such a massive overclock makes this product really interesting to buy. It's a bit of a paradox though as the XT can be overclocked also but you'll agree with me that the results you where able to witness today is nothing to be ashamed about, I liked what I saw, period.

So here we go, excellent product, nice bundle and the addition of DHES grants you the opportunity of forcing some extra performance out of the card. Definitely a winner and therefore the HIS Excalibur 9800Pro IceQ receive our prestigious Editor's Choice award.

Product type: Graphics card
 Manufacturer: HIS
 Website: www.hightech.com.hk
 MSRP: € 499 / USD 399
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