HIS X1900XT IceQ3 Dual DL-DVI VIVO 512MB

As power users, we'd all love to own one, or perhaps even two, of today's latest and greatest graphics cards. But wanting to own the best and having the means to do so are two totally different things.  Lucky for us, there are usually a multitude of products that fall in just behind the top-of-the-line that tend to offer similar features and only marginally lower performance for a more palatable price.

The product we'll be looking at today, the HIS Radeon X1900 XT IceQ3, falls into this category. As its name implies, the HIS Radeon X1900 XT IceQ3 is powered by ATI's X1900 XT GPU. But unlike an ATI built card, HIS' model sports a custom cooling apparatus that not only performs better than the "stock" model, but it's also much quieter too. In addition to the custom cooler, HIS also throws in far more accessories than ATI, and most of their board partners as well.  Take a look...

HIS Radeon X1900 XT IceQ 3 Features & Specifications

Features - ATI Radeon X1900 . 380+ million transistors on a 90nm fabrication process . Ultra-threaded architecture with fast dynamic branching . Forty-Eight pixel shader processors . Eight vertex shader processors . 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface . Native PCI Express x16 bus interface . Dynamic Voltage Control Ring Bus Memory Controller . 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads . Programmable intelligent arbitration logic . Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs . Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test . Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1) . Fast Z-Buffer Clear . Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering . Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine . Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware . Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations . Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads . Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control . Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency . 3Dc+ texture compression _o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats _o High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats . Multiple Render Target (MRT) support . Render to vertex buffer support . Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL 2.0 Advanced Image Quality Features . 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing . 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing . 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes _o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling _o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes _o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode _o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions . 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes _o Up to 128-tap texture filtering _o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options . High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo Video and Display Engine . High performance programmable video processor _o Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding (including DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback), encoding & transcoding _o DXVA support _o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering _o Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion _o Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing _o 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion) . Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time . HDR tone mapping acceleration _o Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output . Flexible display support _o Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters _o DVI 1.0 / HDMI compliant and HDCP ready _o Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs _o 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output _o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color) _o Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display _o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs _o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays _o XilleonTM TV encoder for high quality analog output _o YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays _o Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays _o Fast, glitch-free mode switching _o VGA mode support on all outputs . Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550 CrossFire . Multi-GPU technology . Four modes of operation: _o Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance) _o Supertiling (optimal load-balancing) _o Scissor (compatibility) _o Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality) _o Program compliant

HIS includes a very complete assortment of bundled accessories with the X1900 XT IceQ3. In addition to the card itself, HIS has bundled a myriad of cables, software, adapters, and manuals with the X1900 XT IceQ3. In the box we found S-Video and Composite Video cables, an HD component output adapter, an S-Video / Composite Video Input & Video Output Dongle to compliment the card's ViVo functionality, and two DVI-to-DB15 monitor adapters.  HIS also throws in an obligatory user's manual and driver CD, along with a few other discs that contain full versions of PowerDirector SE, Power2Go, 3D Album Picture Pro, an off-beat racing game called FlatOut, and the popular game Dungeon Siege.  One disc also contains trial versions of PowerDVD Copy, MediaShow, and PowerBackup, and a handful of game demos for HL2, Act of War, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, Tribes Vengeance, and Axis & Allies.  Lastly, a couple of HIS case badges are thrown in for good measure.

This is was we would consider a very complete bundle.  There are games that'll somewhat exploit the card's capabilities, utilities to expose certain features, and cables to connect the card to almost any type of display. Good job HIS.