HIS Radeon X1600 XT Review

Introduction

Radeon X1600 XT is ATI’s latest mid-range graphics chip. Today we will review HIS Radeon X1600 XT IceQ Turbo with 256 MB and we will compare its performance to other members of the Radeon X1000 series, to previous ATI chips and also with competing products from NVIDIA. Its main advantage over competing products is its cooler design, which blows hot air out of the computer case and thus preventing your PC from overheating.

Figure 1: HIS Radeon X1600 XT IceQ Turbo.

Radeon X1600 XT runs officially at 590 MHz and accesses its memory at 1.38 GHz (22.08 GB/s), 128 bits per clock cycle. The funny thing about this particular model is that HIS announces it as being a “Turbo” model, running at 600 MHz with its memory running at 1.4 GHz, as you can see in Figure 2. First, these figures are very close to the original specs set by ATI. Second, we run PowerStrip software and this program told us that our VGA was running at 587.25 MHz with is memory running at 693 MHz x 2 (1,386 MHz) – i.e., the official specs. Third, to make it funnier, HIS’ non-Turbo model is announced as using the official specs, as you can see here (compare to HIS Radeon X1600 XT IceQ Turbo official specs). Ok. Turbo and non-Turbo are exactly the same board, however the Turbo version comes with HIS’ iTurbo overclocking utility. So, it isn’t factory-overclocked.

Figure 2: Label found on HIS Radeon X1600 XT IceQ Turbo box.

If you want to learn more about ATI’s Radeon X1000 series and its difference from previous ATI products, read our article on this subject.
 
You can see in our tutorial “ATI Chips Comparison Table” the difference between this new chip and the other chips from ATI, while on our tutorial “NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table” you can compare it to its competitors from NVIDIA.

Let’s now take a closer look at the Radeon X1600 XT IceQ Turbo from HIS.