VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2013-11-12
Are you a gamer on a budget? Do you own a 22’’ monitor for playing the latest games or even a 24’’ and would not mind sacrificing some detail levels? Then the HIS R7 260X might be for you since it comes with a custom PCB and cooling system which allows raising the GPU/memory frequencies even further in order to gain some extra FPS.
At first I would like to thank HIS for offering a sample of their R7 260X iPower IceQ X2 2GB Video Card for testing and reviewing.
“HIS - Hightech Information System Limited is an internationally acclaimed graphics cards company. Time and time again, HIS were compared and tested by hundreds of worldly renowned critics. The results are phenomena, HIS have proven to offer far superior, cooler, quieter, and faster graphic cards than any other leading rivals. Up to the fourth quarter of 2011, HIS has won over 1600 awards with AMD graphic solution from major media worldwide. HIS is being recognized by providing performance leading and award-wining products: IceQ, IceQ X and Turbo Edition.
HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality PC products in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to "Glorifying God". Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors.
Headquartered in Hong Kong, and with sales offices and distribution networks in Europe, Middle East, North and South America, Asia Pacific Regions; our worldwide customers benefits from efficient and localized services. ISO Certified, HIS's manufacturing facility in China is managed by a team of professionals with expertise in quality control and production planning. Working with world-class clients, HIS has been consistently meeting high quality standards and fulfilled volume order in short lead-time.
HIS is proud to be AMD's Authorized 1st Tier AIB Partner, Certified Partner and Launching Partner. Long term and favorable relationship with AMD, enable HIS to work closely with AMD to promote the HIS AMD Graphics Board; and to strive for best value on the marketing and sales of HIS AMD Product Line.
In Sept 2003, HIS incorporated the state-of-the art Supreme Cooling Technology in the award winning HIS 9800Pro IceQ, which caught the attention of worldwide media. Since then, HIS IceQ series and the latest IceQ X series has been the limelight in the market for its outstanding performance and features over the other rivals.
Today, HIS continues its avid commitment to quality product and service. HIS is certain to be Your Choice of Graphics Board Supplier.”
We have finally entered the mid-range and mid-range to low-end segments and one of their members is the R7 260X video card which is built around the Bonaire GPU which we have reviewed some while ago: Radeon HD 7790.
When looking at both Radeon HD 7790 and the 260X we will see the technical specification similarities like 896 Shader Units, the 128-bit memory bus, 16 ROPs and the same transistor count. AMD has packed this time 2048MB of GDDR5 RAM and increased the clocks a little bit more for both GPU (1100MHz vs 860MHz) and memory (1625MHz vs 1500MHz). The HIS R7 260X iPower IceQ X2 card does not come with higher frequencies but it was custom-built in order to have a better overclocking potential.
The PowerTune function is now available on the full range so the GPU clock gets modified depending on power draw, heat and performance factors. Eyefinity has been also updated to V2 DDM, with the ability of 5x1 landscape and custom multi-monitor resolutions. Also, with the new series we are permitted to use the Eyefinity feature without the need of a DisplayPort adapter.
If the card provides for example two DVI ports and one HDMI, we can use all three to set up Eyefinity.
The R7 260X comes with the Tensilica DSP which enables TrueAudio function, which is also available on the high-end 290 and 290X offerings. Surprisingly we have found out that it was available on the first incarnation of Bonaire too, but was not enabled.
On the 260X we can find three DSP cores which are dedicated to the HiFi2 EP Audio and employ Tensilica’s Xtensa ISA. The DSP is fully programmable which is very good for the programmers. Each core comes with 32KB of instruction and data cache along with 8KB of scratch RAM. One fast interface connects the DSPs to 384KB of shared internal memory which is organized in 8KB banks. Also, up to 64MB of buffer is addressable via a low-latency bus interface shared with the display pipeline.
Mantle is a new API introduced with the latest seriers, which gives the game developers direct access to the GPUs by using the Graphics Core Next architecture. AMD has recently clarified that Mantle creates for PC a development platform which is similar to the one for the consoles, which already offer low-level APIs, close-to-metal programming, easier development and more. By creating a more console-like developer environment, Mantle improves time to market, reduces development costs and allows more efficient rendering and ultimately improves performance for gamers.
DirectX 11.2, which is coming with Windows 8.1 is compatible with the new series.
The main attraction of the latest DirectX seems to be Tiled Resources, which exposes AMD’s partially-resident textures via DirectX and we are also dealing with hardware-managed virtual memory for GPU.
iPower for More Voltage, More Overclocking
iPower design allows the card to carry more voltage, expanding overclocking capability to a new level!
IceQ X² – Cooler, Quieter
Cooler
With IceQ X², the card is cooler than the reference cooler.
Quieter
IceQ X² is one of the quietest coolers, making the card quieter than the reference cooler. The card is below 28dB when watching movies, surfing Facebook, working. The card remains quiet whether you are gaming, online socializing, entertaining or working.
Fan Design
The super large 2x 75mm dual axial fans draws massive amount of cool air to cool the GPU directly.
The Q&C fan blade increases air velocity make cooling more efficiently while keeping noise level at minimum.
The fan is extremely durable with a life span of up to 50,000 hours.
3x 6mm wide heatpipes optimize cooling performance by removing heat from the core area.
The extra-large 62x62mm copper heatsink provides a large area to dissipate heat efficiently.
The card also carries memory and mosfet heat sinks to provide extra heat dissipation from these areas.
The card also features fan control and monitoring, you are able to read fan speed & Asic temperature from iTurbo or other softwares.
Long Lasting Design: Safer, Last Longer!
Enhances stability in critical gaming situations!
HIS cards are engineered with the highest standard of safety, preventing them any potential damages. Full Solid State Capacitors ensures the best power quality and enhances the card’s stability in critical gaming situations!
Built for Crossfire
CrossFireX Ready!
The card's is armed with Crossfire Connector, ready for CrossFire & strengthened performance!
iTurbo - Your Graphics Card’s Assistant
iTurbo is your graphics card’s assistant to control your card to be quiet, cool. Experience overclocking by simply pressing the iTurbo Button!
User Friendly Overclocking Software: Cooler, Quieter, OC!
iTurbo's Fan Control and Fan Monitoring allow easy adjustment of your card to its maximum cooling performance or to run your card quietly!
Press iTurbo: OC Right Away!
With the smart auto overclocking function, users can experience a slight performance boost for selected HIS graphic cards with just one click!
Powerful Overclocking Software
Either you wish to unleash its full potential or to make it more environmental friendly, iTurbo is ready for you!
The HIS Radeon R7 260X IceQ X2 card packaging features the same box-art as the previously reviewed cards, which presents us the main product highlights:
On one of the sides we will get to see the box contents:
On the opposite side the manufacturer has included the System Requirements:
Detailed product features can be found on the back side of the box:
By removing the top packaging layer, we will end up with a black box, which has the HIS logo in the middle:
After lifting the top cover, we will be able to find one DVI-to-VGA adapter along with a leaflet which shows the correct installation procedure:
The card is held inside a thick layer of foam material so it won’t get damaged during transport:
The manufacturer has also wrapped the card inside an anti-static bag for additional protection:
As we move from the high-end lines to the mainstream and low-end offerings, we will be able to see slight modifications to the cooling systems too; the R7 260X IceQ X2 card comes with a top plastic shroud which encloses two 75mm dual-axial fans:
The fans are engineered to produce low noise while moving a lot of air and have a life span of up to 50000 hours:
Between the two fans we will get to see the company logo:
On the lateral sides we won’t see much since the shroud covers most of the cooling system:
In the back, the card has only one 6-pin PCI-Express power connector:
On the bottom surface of the PCB we will be able to see some stickers along with the mounting screws of the cooling system:
A single Crossfire finger is present with this card:
As on the Radeon HD 7790, the R7 260X also comes with a NCP81022 controller for handling the power management of the graphic card (for both GPU and memory):
In order to disassemble the card, we will have to remove the four spring-loaded screws around the GPU area:
The card comes with a very tidy PCB design:
Compared to the stock variant from AMD, HIS has opted for a DirectFET approach:
The memory chips come from SK Hynix and have the H5GQ4H24MFR-R2C code name, which tells us that they are rated to run at 1375MHz:
In the lower right corner we will be able to see the 4-pin connector which powers both fans:
Opposite to it we will be able to see the 6-pin PCI-Express power connector:
In the center we have the Bonaire GPU, built on a 28nm technology at TSMC:
CPU: Intel I5 3570K Retail @ 4.7GHz
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 OC
RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 2x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)
Video: Currently reviewed card
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
With the help of the GPU-Z 0.7.4 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
To extract even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO64 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 4.0 at 2560x1440 resolution for an additional 40 to 50 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 22.3 degrees Celsius:
Before measuring out the noise the video card was producing, we have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and we found out it was 28.7dBA (with everything turned off).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of Catalyst Control Center:
Time to draw again the line after taking the HIS R7 260 through water and fire; again we are dealing with a custom-built model for achieving better overclocking results, but also a much more efficient cooling system which keeps low noise levels under maximum stress. The card is practically a slightly overclocked Radeon HD 7790 with added (or enabled) features like Mantle, DirectX 11.2 or TrueAudio.
HIS usually overclock their cards, but this variant has identical speeds to the stock model. The card becomes attractive though when we raise speeds for both GPU and memory so we were able to exceed the performances of our overclocked XFX Black Edition 7790 which was the speediest Bonaire model we have tested so far:
In order to raise the frequencies, we did not use this time the iTurbo utility since it did not detect the card correctly at the time of the testing and when trying to raise the speeds and Power Limit through Catalyst, the card simply refused to raise its frequencies to 3D speeds and only ran at 2D clocks. After trying more utilities, we have found out that ASUS GPU Tweak worked perfectly for achieving our goal and we were able to max out the memory slider without any issues.
The card comes with 2GB instead of 1GB we had on the XFX 7790 BE model and we have seen a clear performance hit at high resolutions when the game benchmarks were exceeding the 1GB buffer present on the card.
We would recommend the card for playing the latest games at medium to high detail levels at 1680x1050; when running at Full HD we may need to lower the detail levels most of the time in order to reach playable status.
Since there are also overclocked 2GB Radeon HD 7790 models available on the market with custom cooling, we have seen a 3 to 4 Euro difference between this card and the 7790 offerings (the HIS R7 260X IceQ X2 can be had for around 144 Euros).
We would like to thank again to HIS for making this review possible!