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Where as the Leadtek card is a standard example of a 7600 GS, with reference design and pricing, the HIS X1600 XT IceQ Turbo is far from a standard X1600. Firstly, it is a good £15-£25 more than most other X1600 XTs but it also has slightly higher clock speeds and it has the Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer pre-installed.

The cooler is considerably quieter than the default X1600 XT cooler, and keeps temperatures lower at the same time. However, it is a fair amount wider and will eat up an adjacent slot.

The default clock speeds for an X1600 XT are 587MHz core and 693MHz (1,386MHz effective) memory. Because this is the “Turbo” version, using the included software you can boost this to an amazing (wait for it!) 600MHz core and 702MHz (1,404MHz effective) memory. Other than the fact HIS can now put “Turbo” in to the product name, an overclock this small is about as useful as a poor metaphor.

The core itself has 12 pixel shaders, five vertex shaders but only four pixel output engines. In theory, we should see slightly lower frame rates when compared to the 7600 GS. Although the significantly faster GDDR3 memory on ATI’s ring bus memory controller may well make up the difference.

Feature wise, the Radeon X1600 XT supports FSAA in conjunction with full precision HDR (rather than the pseudo HDR seen in Half Life 2 and the like) as well as High Quality AF. Both of these features are likely to be used considering the extra power required to do so.

Just like the 7600 GS, this card doesn’t require any external power. This means it must consume under 75W, which is the maximum allowed through the PCI-E slot. Despite the giant cooler on this card, overclocking was a fiasco. Just when I thought it was stable at several differing settings, it would randomly fall over during testing despite a lack of artefacts. It could well be a lack of power causing issues. After several hours of fiddling, I decided not to try any more as everyone’s experience will be different. What we can certainly conclude, is that this will hardly be noted as being a core for immense overclocking.

Bundled with the card is a copy of Flat Out, the usual DVI Adapters, S-Video Cable and a break-out for Composite output.

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