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HiS Radeon x800 XL IceQ II Turbo (PCX)
Product type: Graphics card
Memory: (256 MB GDDR3)
Manufacturer: HIS
Website: www.HISdigital.com

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Today we're going take a look at another product review from HiS Technology. It's quite amazing what this Hong Kong based company was able to accomplish in the year and a half we've know them. They went from a quite unknown status to one very reputable company here in Europe. Of course they had an advantage when names like Hercules and Creative Labs left the difficult to penetrate European videocard market. The products that HiS brings to you, the consumer, never degraded though. Always when I open up that box for a product review I know we'll find high-quality hardware accompanied by a great gadget and software bundle. The high level of quality products that they try to insert into that crowded market is what is making them special compared to others. Due to the little extra's they are slightly more expensive, but you know that if you buy a HiS product that you are on the right track for sure because to date we have not found even one single product slightly questionable.

And how boring this may sound, but today's product is no different. I opened up the box and I immediately went "okay, that thing is going to kick some booty." I'd almost be able to recommend the product without testing it just from the looks of it. But of course we won't. Every product that we recommend will undergo some very extreme testing, a photo shoot, benchmarks and get a nice conclusion where everything is wrapped and summed up for you nicely to make an informed decision. Does this HiS product fit your needs? Well, let's find out.

The product that we are testing today is the Radeon x800 XL from HiS. The Radeon x800 XL is ATI's new high-end product yet within that segment on the lower and thus more affordable section. A product developed under codename R430 and built on the smaller 0.11 micron fabrication process.

With no less than sixteen pixel pipelines and six vertex engines this is in fact a product that can compete with those fast "green ones" in the form of GeForce 6800 GT. It's running at a steady 400 MHz graphics core where it's 256 MB GDDR3 memory is doing almost 1 GHz. Quite some nifty specifications for sure.

HiS Radeon 800 XL - 256 MB gDDR3 - IceQ II Turbo

The product was made for the PCI-Express platform yet expect a (bridged) AGP version out in retail soon also. The x800 XL my friends is a product that I like very much. Next to all the specifications HiS will bring you value in the form of options. We opted for the IceQ II version, that means a huge, yet very silent cooling and additional iTurbo overclocking software that makes the product run faster with the push of a button. Of course we'll explain all the features in this review, but I'm trying to round out the introduction here!

One more thing, though it's reasonably affordable and it'll offer you a tremendous amount performance, it's hard to determine what exactly you are buying these days. To understand where this product exactly is performance wise the best way to explain it is to look at a small overview on the remarkable amount of x800/x850 there currently are on the market versus their primary specifications.

Let's have a look in a nice overview: