HIS X1950Pro IceQ3 Turbo

INTRODUCTION

Even though I am sure most of us would love to be able to buy one or two X1950XTX or GeForce 8800GTX cards, the hard reality is that we cannot afford to. We have to look to a cheaper alternative that still hopefully will perform well enough.

One of these cheaper alternatives is the Radeon X1950Pro. This is basically a cheaper X1900GT with faster clocks and internal Crossfire support.

Today I am testing the HIS X1950Pro IceQ3 Turbo. As the name implies this is the version from HIS that uses the excellent IceQ3 cooler instead of ATI’s noisy reference-cooler.

FEATURES AND SPECIFICATIONS

The X1950Pro uses the R570 chipset (which is based heavily on the R580 chipset) and is done by an 80 nm process.

Let us first look at the specifications for the X1950 Pro.

The main features of this card are:

Internal CrossFire support
Finally! One of the main complaints of Crossfire is that you had to use the huge dongle-cable as well as a master card and a slave card. This is due to a special compositing chip used on the high-end cards. On the X1950Pro the Crossfire support is integrated into the GPU. The card actually has two connectors on the top of the card, similar to a SLI-conenctor, which hints toward the possibility for daisychaining more than 2 cards. 

The crossfire bridge

ICEQ3 Cooler
The IceQ cooling system draws cool air from inside the case and exhausts warm air outwards. This prevents the fan from recycling warm air to cool the VPU, which increases cooling performance and lowers the air temperature inside the case significantly. Even more important is that the card is very silent when doing it.

HDCP support
Earlier each board maker could choose if they wanted to let the video card be HDCP ready or not. This is changed now and the HIS X1950Pro is HDCP Ready which means it can produce a HDCP-signal if you happen to watch a Blue-Ray or HD-DVD movie on your computer. Unfortunately I have neither a Blue-Ray nor a HD-DVD drive so I cannot test this.