HD 2600 XT IceQ Turbo appearance
And so for the second card from HIS - the HD 2600 XT IceQ Turbo 256MB GDDR3.
You may have noticed that in the naming department HIS has simply swapped 'Zalman Fan' for 'IceQ Turbo'. This proves fitting as that seems to be almost all it's done from an engineering perspective as well.
Because of this, it makes little sense to look at the board as a whole, rather to simply focus on what has been changed.
The IceQ cooler appears to be the same as that fitted to the HIS X1650XT IceQ Turbo we looked at last year. It offers vastly superior cooling performance to the Zalman VF100-Al fitted to its stable-mate.
This has allowed HIS to pump up the card's clock-speeds, earning it the Turbo part of its name. The GPU core gets a modest increase to 823.5MHz, while memory is notched all the way up to 1908MHz - an increase of over 500MHz.
Happily, though, that doesn't result in the IceQ Turbo being excessively noisy. Indeed, despite producing considerably lower temperatures at higher clockspeeds than the HD 2600XT Zalman Fan, the overall noise level is lower than that of the reference card.
The price to pay for this improved cooling performance is that the IceQ heatsink is a two-slot design. That's not a problem for most people but could be an issue for anyone considering using the card in a mATX system.
Although the back panel is double height - to accommodate a grille to exhaust warm air out the back of the system - the socket layout is the same as on the HD 2600 XT Zalman Fan, with a pair of HDCP-protected, dual-link DVI-I outputs and VIVO mini-DIN socket.
