Originally posted by: northbrook
I have seen about 100 reviews of these cards, but they seem to be impossible to find. Some place called SuperPCMart has a lot, and NewEgg. Are they as good as reviewed?
I don't have one of the HIS IceQ II Turbos' - I have an HIS Excaliber X800 XT IceQ II PE 256MB which I bought at the end of August 2004. It uses the Arctic Cooling ATI Silencer 4 (the R420 version of the AC Silencer).
I don't know about the current models, but last year's HIS X800 XT IceQ II Turbo model was an ATI X800 XT (non-PE, 500MHz Core/1GHz Memory) which, when overclocked achieved PE speeds (520MHz Core/1.12GHz Memory). And, as you probably know, the X800 XT (non-PE) had a down-clocked X800 XT PE core. Initially, other than that there really was no difference between the PE and non-PE cards. Later on, however, I think ATI started using slightly slower memory on the non-PE cards. Maybe to save costs, maybe an attempt to stop people from flashing their VIVO models to PE speed?
Anyway, I've had my HIS card for just over a year now and it is a great card. Great performance, and it also runs very quiet thanks to the Arctic Cooling ATI Silencer that comes on it. The AC Silencers' are normally much more quiet than the "stock" ATI reference-design model HSFs'.
EDIT: Typos!