HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro IceQ Turbo 512MB

Upon initial inspection, one of the first things you'll notice is the fact that HIS has kept true to their IceQ Turbo line of cards and added a large, two slot, UV reflective, Arctic Cooling heatsink to their Radeon HD 2600 Pro card. The card uses HIS’ unique teal colored PCB and even has black colored DVI connectors with gold plating.

When we take a look at the card's on-board 512MB of GDDR2 memory, we can see that the huge heatsink actually doesn’t cover any of the onboard memory chips, just the card’s GPU. There is no external power source needed with the 2600 series from ATI, the power in the PCIe x16 slot is sufficient for the card to run at maximum performance. It’s important to note that the HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro IceQ Turbo has 512MB of GDDR2 memory, double that of ATI’s reference design.

For comparison, we pictured the reference ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256MB memory with the HIS Radeon X2600 Pro IceQ Turbo that we are testing today. The most obvious difference between the two is of course how small the reference design heatsink is in comparison to the IceQ Turbo heatsink that HIS is using with their card. The Radeon 2600 series run relatively cool by today’s standards, so it might be a little overkill putting on such a large heatsink on the card.

It’s also important to note the price difference between the cards. The reference design Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256MB of memory sells for about $90-$95 while the HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro IceQ Turbo with 512MB of memory is currently priced at around $130. And on another side note, neither the reference nor the HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro cards come with Crossfire connectors. Most of ATI’s add in board partners are choosing to add Crossfire connectors to their Radeon HD 2600 XT cards and not the Radeon HD 2600 Pro.