HIS Radeon X1950 Pro IceQ3 Turbo

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HIS has a long history of taking excellent products and honing their edge further with the addition of some of their near legendary tweaks. The IceQ3 Cooling assembly is not the least of these. Providing copper high count fins, heatpipes, separated memory and GPU sinks all within a UV reactive housing that operates super quiet is a bonus in itself. HIS releasing their cards in 'Turbo' trim to take advantage of this superior cooling and be factory overclocked is another big draw. The biggest draw here for ATi fans is the RV570 chipset and its native Crossfire support. With this support now being implemented on new generation graphics chips, ATi has made running a Crossfire set up as easy as plugging two cards into an appropriate board. With the mix and match possibilities, this surpasses with ease, that we have seen with NVidia.

As we said in the beginning of this review, the $250 price point attracts the largest audience of gamers. We all would like to have $700 cards but that's a lot of bank. As with all dual video card solutions, Crossfire offers the user the opportunity to put an extra level of performance on layaway. Pick up a card now and when you're ready pick up a second for that dreamed of performance boost later. It is in this vein of cost, that we come to the bitter rub with HIS's Radeon X1950 Pro IceQ3 Turbo card. In terms of raw performance we have seen that the X1950 Pro and GeForce 7900 GS are on near equal footing. Where they are not, is at the pump. Doing searches on Pricewatch and Google, 7900 GS cards can be had easily for $200 where the HIS X1950 Pro IceQ3 Turbo was seen at the $260 price point. If you already have a Crossfire ready mainboard, the HIS X1950 Pro IceQ3 Turbo is an excellent option and one I would even select for myself. On the other hand, if you are shopping for boards and haven't decided to go with NVidia's SLI or ATi's Crossfire, a $60 price difference on the VGA card is a hard point to ignore.