As we covered earlier, the X700 Pro IceQ Turbo VIVO is designed to run overclocked right out of the box. By clicking the Turbo button within the iTurbo utility, the card automatically ramps up to 460/960, compared to the default 425/860. Naturally, we wanted to see how much more headroom there was, so we loaded the latest version of Powerstrip and got to tweaking.
Interestingly enough, the highest speed we could reach with this card using Powerstrip was 475MHz core and 1000MHz DDR memory. What makes this interesting is that these are the top settings available in the iTurbo utility as well. This is a sizeable increase in clock speed that added 12 FPS to our Half-Life 2 AA/Anisotropic test results at 1600x1200 resolution.
The video card market is somewhat saturated with a multitude of brands and models, making it hard for any one company to stand out from the rest. There are a few that stand out based on name recognition alone, but others need to find other innovative ways to get some attention. HIS is one of those companies.
The HIS X700 Pro IceQ Turbo VIVO 256 is an impressive card on all fronts. While we're not typically fond of products that take up two slots, it's hard not to like the X700 Pro. The performance of this card was solid at its stock speeds and its excellent overclockability overshadowed the two slot issue. We also like the ramsinks included in the overall cooling design of the card as well as its extremely quiet fan assembly. Combine all of these features with VIVO, iTurbo overclocking and a great retail bundle, and we walk away thinking this is one of the better X700 Pros available on the market today. We think this is a high-quality package in every way. The only downside is the availability of the card here in the States. However, if you are lucky enough to come across it, grab it, you will not regret it if you are looking for a solid mid-range PCIe solution.
We give the HIS X700 Pro Turbo VIVO 256 with IceQ a Hot Hardware Heat Meter of 8.5...
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