VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2014-06-26
The second R7 260X video card we are reviewing from HIS is featuring a less complicated cooling system with a single 11-blade fan while the clocks are lower than the OEM version from AMD; this translates to 1000MHz for the GPU and 1250MHz for the memory. Despite the initial values, the card is quite overclockable and is succeeding to get dangerously close to the more expensive model.
At first I would like to thank HIS for offering a sample of their R7 250X iCooler 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.”
iCooler is Quiet
The card is equipped with iCooler, making it extremely quiet and noise level is less than 28dB. You feel the quietness when viewing photos, browsing webs, checking your email and playing movies in UVD mode.
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!
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!
iTurbo is compatible with all cards! Enjoy OC no matter what card you have!
Built for Crossfire
CrossFireX Ready!
The card's is armed with Crossfire Connector, ready for CrossFire & strengthened performance!
New Technology, New Experiences
GCN
With AMD 2nd generation GCN technology, the card optimizes DirectX® 11.2 gaming performance automatically up to 2.5 times faster! It also offers up to 4.5x compute performance and up to 95% lower GPU Idle Power Consumption!
Apps Faster & Smoother!
The card enables a “quality graphics” experience on everyday applications, giving huge performance boosts on image processing, file compression, media converter apps, and a lot more!
AMD TrueAudio
AMD Eyefinity
Set up Eyefinity on 3 displays with No ACTIVE DisplayPort Adapter is needed.
PCI-e 3.0 Support
Armed with the latest PCI-e 3.0 bus design maximizes performance by delivering double bandwidth per lane of PCI-e 2.x. Paired the card with the latest platforms and get the ultimate performance!
More Graphics, Less Power!
The new architecture of the card gets more usable processing power for your money, enabling better frame rates in the latest games at high resolutions. In addition, with AMD ZeroCore Power & AMD PowerTune technologies, you can optimize the balance between performance and power consumption of your system by adjusting the engine clock during runtime of the card. Manage the power and keep your wallet loaded!
See More, Enjoy More!
The card supports 30” LCD monitor and any large size TV up to 80" feature with 16:9 ratio in amazing 4096 by 2160 resolution. Up-scaling your computer into a multimedia center with the biggest display!
Enjoy HD Beauty
With Full HD 1080p support, the card delivers high quality 1920X1080 graphics, enabling seamless full-screen video playback. See HD, hear HD and feel HD - Enjoy the beautiful graphics now with the card!
Enjoy Copy Protected Movies
The card is HDCP complaint, enabling users to play copy-protected content, such as commercial DVD movies.
Enjoy True to Life Graphics
ULTRA HD videos have resolution four times that of current HD videos, meaning images too clear that may deceive your eyes! With the card, you are set for getting the movie theater experience to your home. You may be able to watch a video shooting the Eiffel tower and zoom it in to see your friend’s face clearly from the top! Get your eyes impressed and enjoy mind-blowing graphics with extreme clarity, depth and texture!
See More, Win More!
The card is capable to turn your computer into a super gaming machine. Enjoy the latest 3D games with stunning graphics and effects that your enemies cannot match! Get an immersive experience with AMD Eyefinity!
Expand your game across up to 3 displays while your opponents have one monitor. Along with all-new support for stereo 3D, universal bezel compensation and brand new display configurations, take the unfair advantage over your opponent and win more with the surround sight
View More, Work Better
Having one dedicated screen just for twitter or Facebook and a second for outlook is not a dream anymore. The card features a DisplayPort for enhanced workspace flexibility. You can easily connect to the 27” Apple LED Cinema Displays with the DisplayPort. The dual-link DVI port allows you connect to a 30” DVI display up to 2560x1600. Resolution can even reach 4096x2160 with HDMI® , good for TV up to 80"!
Hear Better in Video Conference
Most GPUs today support only one audio stream at a time. The card, however, has Discrete Digital Multi-Point Audio that can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams. Audio seamlessly follows the video, providing affordable multi-display, multi-audio conferencing for consumers!
We are coming back to the Radeon R7 260X with a new card variant from HIS, which sports a more aggressive pricing in order to pick up even more customers which were undecided before. The 260X GPU takes part from the mid-range segment of the latest AMD generation and is built around the Bonaire architecture which was also present on the Radeon HD 7790.
As with the older GPU, we are dealing with 896 Shader Units, the 128-bit memory bus, 16ROPs and the exact same transistor count. On the first HIS 260X variant with dual fans we have experienced the stock clocks as on the AMD OEM for both GPU and memory while with the present card they have decided to downclock the GPU to 1000MHz (from 1100MHz) and the memory to 1250MHz (from 1625MHz). Usually, the lowered memory clocks should not decrease the performance too much but the GPU clock is another story. We will get back to this in a small overclocking test later in the review.
The most interesting feature that was brought with the Bonaire GPU at this price range was TrueAudio function, which is also available on the high-end R9 290 and 290X variants. 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.
The product packaging is similar to what we have seen with the R7 250X and includes the box-art with a sword, advertisements for the iCooler custom technology, the iTurbo overclocking application but also a small pictogram which shows the total memory quantity:
On the right side of the box we have a listing of inside contents:
The back side is coming with the full list of Product Specifications and System Requirements; here we also have in-depth explanations regarding the GCN Architecture, AMD TrueAudio Technology but also Ultra Resolution Gaming:
After removing the top packaging layer, we will end up with a black box of the same size, which holds the HIS logo in the middle portion:
Besides the card, we will also receive a small envelope with the rest of the bundle:
Speaking of the envelope, this one holds inside an installation disk, one Quick Installation Guide, but also one small HIS case sticker:
The board is held secure inside a transparent plastic mold, with foam material underneath the PCB:
If we look superficially, we might say that the HIS 250X and 260X coolers look alike; this is a bit wrong since the similarities stop at the color of the fan and the aspect of the upper plastic shroud; the fan now houses 11 blades instead of 9 in order to maximize the cooling efficiency and the aluminum heatsink fins are distributed now in a different fashion:
Here are also some views from the lateral sides of the video card:
In order to have better cooling on the VRM, HIS has decided to use a small aluminum heatsink, which uses a thermal pad as interface:
The card is also equipped with a single Crossfire finger:
As video outputs, we do have one DisplayPort, one HDMI and two DVIs:
On the back side we will be able to see an assortment of product stickers, but also the screws which hold both heatsinks (GPU, VRM) into place:
On this side we will also find the uP1643P 3+2 Phase Buck Controller from uPI Semiconductor Corp:
In order to get access to the top part of the PCB, we’ll have to remove the four screws in the back which keep the large cooling system in place:
Here we have a closer look at the VRM:
In the middle we get to see the Bonaire GPU, built on 28nm at TSMC:
While the previous model was equipped with SK Hynix memory chips, now we have found Elpida, which house the W4032BABG-60-F code name, which are specified to run at 1500MHz:
The fan is connected to a port which is located on the bottom right side of the PCB:
A closer look at the bottom side of the heatsink shows the modified fin distribution:
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 0.7.8 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
To receive more in-depth information regarding the GPU, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
From the HIS website, we can download the iTurbo video card utility, which is very handy for customizing the fan speeds, monitoring several parameters or performing overclocking. The interface is user-friendly and presents itself like a wheel console, in its minimized mode:
The UI can open up in a larger form, in order to expose the full-sized interface. The menus can be accessed on top of the applications and these include Home, Info, Overclock and so on. In the Home tab we can find more news regarding the manufacturer, the ongoing promotions or the latest drivers:
The Info tab will display various hardware information regarding the card like card name, GPU series name, die size, memory size, bus width, ROPs and so on; with the R7 260X we won't get proper info displayed here:
The Overclock tab comes with adjustments for the GPU Clock, Memory Clock, Board Power Limit (also present in CCC), but also VDDC. These modifications can be saved by assigning them to different profiles or we can simply jump to the factory defaults; GPU/Memory clocks cannot be adjusted from here on the R7 260X:
From the Fan Control tab, we will be able to monitor the current fan status or adjust the speed to a fixed or custom profile. These modifications can be saved as “Quiet” or “Cool”:
The final tab, Settings, lets us adjust some of the global options like Load on Startup, Show memory clocks, Disable 2D clocks and so on:
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 the 2560x1440 (system) 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 24.7 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 28.8 dBA (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 the HIS iTurbo utility:
Because of the lower GPU and memory clocks of the HIS 260X iCooler model, we could experience a noticeable performance difference compared with the 260X iPower IceQ X2 but even in this state it succeeds to score over our overclocked XFX Radeon HD 7770. The initial samples were clocked a bit higher which means that the GPU was running at 1100MHz while the memory was set at 1500MHz, but the decision to change was made at the last moment, so the cards with the updated clocks will be available during the July month time frame.
The cooling system is much more compact and succeeds to provide great cooling to the GPU and surroundings by using a single fan with 11 blades. During our noise reading tests, we were able to control the speed of the fan via software, but the RPM values were not reported. Talking about the software, we can use iTurbo from HIS but we have found the same problem as when testing the 260X iPower IceQ X2: the sliders are on the 0 position and cannot move and the frequencies are not being detected. In order to modify the values, we have installed ASUS GPU Tweak and it seems that the card holds a respectable overclocking potential, nearing the more expensive dual-fan model:
With the HIS 260X iCooler, we could say that many games can be playable at full detail levels while using the 1680x1050 resolution, while in Full HD we may need to dial-down the settings a little bit in order to enjoy a smooth gaming experience.
From our last 260X review, the prices came down quite a bit, considering that the R7 260X iPower IceQ X2 had an initial price of 144 Euros and now can be found in stores for about 109 Euros. As expected, the HIS Radeon R7 260X iCooler is available for less and to be more exact for about 101 Euros, which makes it quite affordable when taking the overclocking potential into account.
We would like to thank again to HIS for making this review possible!