HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro IceQ Turbo 512MB

To test the HIS Radeon X2600 Pro IceQ Turbo, we set up a new test rig equipped with Intel’s new 1333MHz FSB Core 2 Duo E6750 CPU. We built our system on EVGA’s 680i SLI motherboard and used Corsair’s XMS PC2-8500 DDR2 memory. Since the HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro IceQ Turbo comes factory overclocked and is equipped with a huge Arctic Cooling heatsink fan, we will try to see how high the card can stably overclock and we will compare the card’s performance to that of the reference 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro ($90-$95) and the reference 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT ($105-$115). We’re using the latest drivers, Windows Updates, and patches for our games. To do our testing, we turned all our games to high quality and ran 60 second FRAPS sequences three times, averaging the score you see in the tests.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core 2 Duo E6750

Overclocking the Radeon HD 2600 Pro Turbo engaged...

To find the maximum stable overclocking frequency, we used Overdrive, the built in overclocking utility found in ATI’s Catalyst driver suite. We started the overclocking process by first finding our maximum core clock speed, jumping up by 20MHz, running a handful of tests, and then jumping up 20MHz more. Our magic core clock number turned out to be 740MHz, and with the same process, we found our optimal memory overclock frequency to be 595MHz. To ensure that the card was stable, we ran gaming tests on the card overnight. If we take into account that the card ships overclocked from the factory, the core overclock on the HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro IceQ Turbo was 140MHz and the memory overclock was 95MHz, two high and very respectable overclocked freqencies.