The Board & The Bundle
What's in the box? Well it doesn't matter if you buy the GT or GTO as HiS have included everything you need to setup the card and play a game.
iTurbo Software
Full version of the Game Flatout.
S-Video Cable
RCA Cable
Conversion connecter Mini-Din to RCA
HDTV Output cable
DVI to VGA Adaptor
Spot the difference ;)
The bundle sports a plethora of cables. There is the S-Video in/out cable and a DVI to CRT/VGA adapter so that you are able to hook up CRT VGA monitors to your card. Also quite important for some excellent HDTV usage is a 3-way RCA cable. Although I do believe we should drop the analog component connectivity and go for Digital HDMI (way better signal). Anyway, you can 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 cooling technology, which is called IceQ-II, is something we'll discuss in a minute.
As you have already been able to figure out, both cards lack dual-DVI. You'll get one VGA/CRT and one DVI-I connector. Looking at the near future, I believe we should go dual DVI.
All the same, this is a really fantastic bundle. BTW, we reviewed the game Flatout, you can read that review right here. Although both cards do not have Dual-Link DVI I can tell you that we tested them up-to a resolution of 1920x1200 which worked perfectly fine and crispy sharp.
Included is the PC game Flat Out, quite a funny game and with some nice graphics.
IceQ-II Cooling
It's quite amazing how all IceQ-II based cards show similar temperatures, and yes, I know that this text is getting a little typical with any HiS review, but hey it's the same cooler over and over again as both cards include the charming IceQ II cooling technology. Their plastic shell is UV reactive, so spend a few bucks on a blacklight okay? The outcome is really something else. Look at the photo below.
IceQ-II, despite being the size of an elephant, works fantastically. The cooling system uses the air inside your PC case and exhausts warm air outside the case. This is a huge plus as videocards these days can get quite hot. With normal cooling heat will warm up the ambient temperature of your PC's interior and cascade the effect by warming up other components. The IceQ-II technology helps prevent this as that heat is exhausted outside the PC. Also part of IceQ-II technology is cooling the cards memory as the memory on there is covered by a big metal shim (see below).
Here we see that UV reactiveness at work, ooh come on, that is cute !
Based on the graphics core temperature the fan will rotate either faster or slower (RPM) to maintain acceptable noise levels, but to be honest, even when it's at 100% the noise is hardly noticeable.
HiS states that this cooling will bring you an 11°C temperature drop when compared to the reference cooling solution. I dare to state it's even better then 11 Degrees C as neither card peaked above 55 Degrees C in default configuration. These are fantastic numbers and well within the safety margin so temperature wise the cooling design works quite well. At idle, normal operation, expect ~35-40 Degrees C. At every angle the HIS is looking good.
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