Final thoughts, awards, HEXUS.right2reply
Before we base our conclusion on the HIS X1900 GT's performance against the other cards we tested, let's go over what the card, on its own, has going for it.
HIS's IceQ3 cooling is very nice. Not only does it look good, it sounds good and performs well too. It's almost silent and in our testing the GPU temperature wasn't seen to rise above 60ºC. In fact, at no point did the IceQ3 fan ever spin at full whack. This is great news for anybody looking for an X1900 that's got a decent cooler on it. HIS augment this with an excellent bundle that covers all bases.
So, what do we think about the card compared to the competition? At the time of writing it looks to be about £150 cheaper than a Radeon X1950 XTX. We reckon that's a fair price difference given the performance deficit. A single HIS X1900 GT IceQ3 is around £15 cheaper than a GeForce 7900 GT, and in our tests it was quicker, for the most part.
While a single HIS X1900 GT IceQ3 has a lot of appeal, in CrossFire the picture isn't quite as clear. Sometimes it rocks and sometimes it sucks. That's how it looks to us on i975X, at least. Driver and platform issues appear to be the cause here, so unless software updates remedy the problem, CrossFire on i975X runs the risk of being a disappointment.
If you've got a budget of around £150, HIS's X1900 GT IceQ3 is very attractive, there's no doubt in that. We would suggest that you also look at getting a cheaper X1900 GT with a standard cooler, and assess how much it would cost to independently upgrade the cooler. Of course, HIS has put some effort into the bundle too, which probably tips the balance in its favour.
HIS has produced a reasonably priced, solidly performing, all-round well-thought out product that'll deliver some mighty nice graphics to anyone who buys it. We'll attempt to dissuade you from buying two, however, particularly if you're a Core 2 user on i975X, but keep an eye out in case improvements to CrossFire appear for the platform.
HEXUS Awards
Definitely a great single card if the price stays competitive, so it walks away with a recommendation from us.
In the CrossFire configuration we tested, it worked, but performance in some tests was far short of what we'd like to see, so while we can certify the product as having passed HEXUS.labs testing, we can't recommend it just yet.
HEXUS Where2Buy
The HIS Radeon X1900 GT IceQ3 is available in the US from Newegg. We'll post UK links as we get them.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any of HIS's representatives choose to do so, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
