Board Design

Board Design
Taking a closer look at the board, we can tell that HiS used the standard and, I must say, very clean reference design PCB so do not expect miracles in tweaking thanks to board design. But, the graphics core is cooled with that fantastic cooling solution. Everything has been taken care off.

Let's talk a little about that cooling solution, IceQ-II. The II of course refers to the new model IceQ technology compared to the 9800 series. The cooling solution itself of course comes from Artic cooling, that's not exactly a secret. IceQ II is based on the same cooling dynamics as its older brother.

The IceQ-II cooling system uses the air inside your PC case and exhausts warm air outside the case, this is a huge plus as the x800 series gets quite hot. If you get a reference design x800 with stock cooling then you better be sure that your PC is cooled sufficiently as all that heat will warm up the ambient temperature of your PC's inside and cascade the effect by warming up other components. The IceQ technology helps prevent this.
According to HiS, IceQ-II cooling will bring you an 11 °C lower cooling temperature compared towards the reference cooling solution. When measuring the temperature at the back of the card on the GPU spot we indeed remained at 50-55 Degrees C at 100% GPU utilization, which is very good for a card of this caliber.

Next to that I truly have to compliment the noise level. Why? Well you just won't hear the bloody thing, not even a soft pur. I mean, my HD's make more noise then the IceQ-II does. This is partly due to a function called iTurbo (gotta love the marketing names), which simple adjusts rotational fan speed higher or lower depending on the GPU temperature. In guru wording, it's just a smart fan monitored by a thermal sensor :)

I could think of yet another 500 words to describe IceQ-II technology yet there's noting else I can add towards IceQ-II cooling other then saying well done!

Oh before I forget the memory on the backside has been equipped with ramsinks. As stated before, everything is thought through quite well.

Don't let the looks fool you, the card might say Pro yet this is the XT version alright. I guess the XT stickers weren't finished just yet.