Verdict: HIS attempts to breathe new life into the HD 3850.
With its IceQ range, HIS was one of the first graphics card manufacturers to get the concept of pre-overclocked graphics cards spot on. Four years ago, back in the days of the Radeon 9800 Pro, third-party dual-height graphics card coolers were relatively uncommon. Instead, graphics card makers relied on you either tolerating the noise from a single-height cooler or modding your card with a chunky cooler such as Arctic Cooling's Silencer. The attraction of the pre-overclocked HIS IceQ range was (and still is) that the cards had a large dual-slot cooler as standard. This cooler was quiet and usually allowed you to overclock IceQ cards further than standard cards.
Four years later, does HIS' double whammy of overclocked settings and dual-slot cooler still have the same impact? For a while, the £110 HD 3850 had the advantage of being much cheaper than any of Nvidia's imperious GeForce 8800 cards, while offering much more performance than the similarly priced GeForce 8600 GTS cards. The release of the £117 256MB GeForce 8800 GT looked set to change all that, and at launch, it did. Performance was significantly better than that of a standard-clock Radeon HD 3850 and its price was comparable. However, the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT has risen in price to £135, so this TurboX card is now comparable on cost.
Being competitive on performance will require a little more work, though. Accordingly, HIS has overclocked pretty much everything on this TurboX card. The core speed has been bumped up from 669MHz to 735MHz, which means that all 320 stream processors run 66MHz faster than normal. The Radeon HD 3850's usual 256MB of memory has also been raised to 512MB, and increased in frequency from 828MHz (1.656GHz effective) to 980MHz (1.96GHz effective). However, the memory bus is still 256 bits wide.
The strongest selling point of this TurboX card is its dual-height cooler, which vents hot air out of the back of the case reasonably quietly. However, dual-height coolers are much more common now than in the grand old days of the Radeon 9800 Pro; top-end cards have dual-height coolers as standard nowadays. The rival 256MB GeForce 8800 GT uses a single-height cooler, though, so the IceQ's quieter cooler gives it an edge.
However, whether or not you buy a graphics card largely depends on performance - nice extras such as low noise levels can be considered later. Call of Duty 4 is the most popular of our test games, being firmly inside the top ten of the games sales charts almost every week, so we opened our testing with this game. Unfortunately, the TurboX couldn't manage a playable frame rate at 1,680 x 1,050, with the minimum frame rate dropping to a stuttery 21fps at times, only 3fps faster than a standard Radeon HD 3850. A standard 256MB GeForce 8800 GT can provide a playable minimum frame rate of 27fps in the same test.
The Crysis results are just as damning. High resolutions are out of the question for mid-range cards but, while a standard-clock 256MB GeForce 8800 GT almost provides a playable frame rate at 1,024 x 768, with a minimum of 24fps, the TurboX is well off the mark with a minimum frame rate of only 17fps. This is only 1fps faster than a standard Radeon HD 3850. Even in Need for Speed: Pro Street (its predecessor, Carbon, was very friendly to Radeon cards) the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT was only 2fps slower in our 1,920 x 1,200 test, making the test playable on both cards.
The HIS card's large cooler didn't allow us to overclock the card any further than HIS has already managed. The card would complete our benchmarks with its core and stream processors running faster, but playing a game for longer periods of time caused frequent crashes, making any overclocked scores we were able to collect meaningless.
Conclusion
Graphics cards tend to be much quieter than the wailing banshees of yore; using a third-party dual-slot cooler isn't quite the unique boon it used to be. The cooler and factory overclock make this card £30 more expensive than standard Radeon HD 3850 cards without offering much more performance. However, the killer blow for the TurboX is that it's slower and slightly more expensive than a standard Nvidia 256MB GeForce 8800 GT card.
