HIS Radeon X1650 XT IceQ Turbo and Radeon X1650 XT iSilence II

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the HIS Radeon X1650 XT iSilence II and X1650 XT IceQ Turbo on the Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI - an nForce 4 Intel Edition SLI X16 chipset-based motherboard - powered by an Intel Pentium 4 550 processor and 1GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR2 memory. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults."  The hard drive was then formatted and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest nForce 4 chipset drivers, installed all of the other necessary drivers for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 1536 MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows' Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran the tests.

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Performance Comparisons with 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Details: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06/

3DMark06

Futuremark recently launched a brand new version of its popular benchmark, 3DMark06. The new version of the benchmark is updated in a number of ways and now includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests but also Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail, and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups the number of instructions to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting, and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted, and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well.

For starters, we want to point out that the Radeon X1950 Pro was included solely for proper placement of the Radeon X1650 XT in the current crop of ATI products.  We don't actually expect the two to perform on comparative levels, and won't nitpick on the X1650 XT as such.  The 7600 GT is what should be considered as the competition and for the better part of all three 3DMark06 scores, the cards from HIS outperform it (albeit not by much).  The largest gap between the two cards occurs during the SM3.0 testing, where the X1650 XT out-paces the 7600 GT by 10% with the default clocked iSilence II and 20% with the Turbo model.