HIS X1650 IceQ Turbo

INTRODUCTION

I don’t know if I am alone but lately it feels like both NVIDIA and ATI have been pouring out graphic chipsets left and right, each with small name variations and small subtle differences in clockspeeds, shaders engines and other important features.

Unfortunately this means it might be a bit hard for a regular user to keep up and to figure out which card is better than the other. The card I am testing today, the HIS X1650XT IceQ Turbo, uses the relatively new graphic chipset, the x1650XT from ATI. While the name suggests it is nothing more than a slightly faster X1650 Pro, the truth is that it is much more than that.

HIS - THE COMPANY

Before we move to the actual card let us talk a bit about HIS. This company has been around since 1987 and has always strived to produce the highest quality graphic cards in the industry. Whether they have succeeded or not are of course up to you buyers but we have reviewed a lot of their products the last few years and almost always been impressed with the quality of their products.

Their headquarter is in Hong Kong but they sell all over the world. They are one of ATI’s Authorized 1st Tier AIB partner and I’m pretty sure that will continue even after the AMD-buyout.

One of their first big successes was with the Excalibur line of video cards back in 2002.
These days they are quite famous for their IceQ, IceQ II and now IceQ 3 series of cards which uses some very nice and quiet coolers on the cards.

Enough about the company – let us see what features and specifications the card has.