VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2014-10-09
The HIS R9 290X iPower IceQ X2 Turbo card features a proven 2-fan cooling system and is overclocked from the factory; the custom PCB ensures stability, better overclocking potential and the card should run fine games up to 2560x1440 with medium to high detail levels.
At first I would like to thank HIS for offering a sample of their R9 290X iPower IceQ X2 Turbo 4GB GDDR5 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.”
iPower for More Voltage, More Overclocking
iPower design allows the card to carry more voltage, expanding overclocking capability to a new level!
Turbo: HIS OC Graphics Card
Turbo cards are faster than regular cards! The card is bios-overclocked out of the box with 1040MHz / 5400 MHz core clock and memory clock respectively, offering the performance edge for gamers!
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 or working. The card remains quiet whether you are gaming, online socializing, entertaining or working.
Fan Design
The super large 2x 89mm 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.
The 2x 8mm and 3x 6mm wide heatpipes optimize cooling performance by removing heat from the core area.
The extra-large 40x47.5mm copper heatsink provides a large area to dissipate heat efficiently.
The new black handle makes you easy to carry the card.
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 software.
Backplate Design
The backplate designs to reinforce PCB, keeps PCB more long lasting and not easy deforming.
Long Lasting Design: Safer, Last Longer!
Dual BIOS
The card has two BIOSes, ensuring that the card runs properly; you can always switch to the second BIOS if the card does not run properly with the first BIOS
If you are not aiming at gaming, Silent BIOS is perfect for you. The card runs quieter than the Standard BIOS with about 5dB!
Enhanced Stability in critical gaming situations!
HIS cards are engineered with the highest standards of safety, preventing them any potential damages. Solid-state chokes stabilize the card and Full Solid State Choke capacitors ensure the best power quality and enhance the cards’ stability in critical gaming situations.
OC Equipment
The card is equipped with improved power design which is great for OC! HIS cards utilize Dynamic Phase Control PWM IC to save power for better use. Along with improved power design, digital power design, 2 ounces copper layer, HIS cards make the best out of power, carrying better OC capability and pushing clock speeds to the full potential.
iTurbo – Your graphics card assistant
iTurbo is your graphics card assistant to control center, for adjusting fan speeds or overclocking parameters.
We will continue our VGA review journey by checking another video card from HIS, the R9 290X iPower IceQ X2 Turbo. The product features the flagship Hawaii GPU from AMD, manufactured on the 28nm process. The card features 2816 shader units (compared to 2560 which we have found with the R9 290) and the GPU is clocked at 1040MHz (40MHz higher than the OEM variant). On this model we can see a 100MHz increase on the memory frequency too and for removing the heat efficiently, HIS has included an efficient cooling system which we will describe in detail further down the line.
The flagship card still maintains the same box design as we have learned from the previous models down the line, but let’s zoom in a little bit:
On the top HIS lets us know that the card features an iPower design which means that it has an enhanced hardware build for more stability and overclocking potential; also, the Turbo logo means that the card comes pre-overclocked:
On the bottom side of the packaging we have some logos of the supported technologies:
If we turn the enclosure on one of the sides, we will get to see the list of box contents:
On the opposite side we have an extensive list of system requirements:
If we would like an explanation of the main product features in detail, it is indicated to check the back side of the packaging:
After removing the top layer, we will end up with a large black box, which holds a white HIS logo in the middle:
On the top of the foam material we will get to see a warning leaflet regarding mounting, but also a familiar HIS envelope:
The envelope is holding the installation disk, one Multi-Language Quick Installation Guide and a case sticker:
Besides the foam which keeps the card steady, HIS has also wrapped the product inside an anti-static bag:
As we have seen with the R9 290 card from HIS, this one also uses dual 89mm dual axial fans which offer a balance between noise and CFM and a life span of up to 50000 hours:
The fans are encased inside a golden metallic shroud:
On the top left side we have the IceQ X2 logo along with a Turbo sticker:
The lateral shots are meant to show the complexity of the cooling system, but we will find out more after we take it for disassembly:
On the back side of the card we can find a large plate, which reinforces the overall strength; between the metal and the PCB HIS has used a transparent plastic layer in order to avoid short-circuits:
Despite the length of the PCB, the cooling system still exceeds its size by a little bit:
A BIOS switcher allows us to work with either the Silent or Standard variants:
The card needs two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors for supplying extra juice to the card:
In order to check out the frontal part of the PCB, we will have to remove the cooling system; this means that we have first to remove the smaller GPU backplate:
Here we will find a secondary metallic plate which covers the memory chips and the top left VRM component; HIS has extended this metallic plate upwards for providing a carry handle:
After carefully removing the plate, we will discover the memory chips, which have thermal pads as interface:
SKHynix is the manufacturer and the H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C parts are specified to run at 1500 MHz:
The Hawaii GPU is manufactured on the TSMC 28nm process:
Here is a closer look at the VRM component after the plate removal:
The main VRM also has a separate metallic sink for more efficient heat evacuation:
Nearby we will find the International Rectifier IR 3567B voltage controller, with SVI2 support:
Both fans get juice from a single 4-pin connector:
On the opposite side we have the two PCI-E Express power connectors:
The massive heatsink holds no less than five heatpipes, two which are 8mm and three 6mm:
The plate mounting points have rubber grommets included so it won’t scratch the PCB surface:
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 0.7.9 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:
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:
The Fan Control tab allows customizing the curve in manual mode or setting a fixed value:
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 22.9 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 28.9 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:
We were quite impressed by the performances of the HIS R9 290X iPower IceQ X2 Turbo card, even if it has been launched with a certain delay. Compared to their previous R9 280X flagship, we can see some notable improvements with the cooling system like the addition of a back plate for reinforcing the PCB. When compared to the Gigabyte R9 290X WindForce OC video card, we can see a notable increase in memory speed and the use of SKHynix memory as opposed to Elpida, which permits getting higher frequencies (1350MHz vs 1250MHz). Many cards with Elpida RAM were plagued by the Black Screen phenomenon, at least the ones included in the first batches, while the SKHynix versions have proven to be much more stable. The frequency differences allow the card to exceed the performances of the Gigabyte model and this can be clearly seen from the synthetic and gaming benchmarks.
With a single card, we should be able to play most titles at 2560x1440 at medium to high details; 4K output is possible and we have tested the HDMI interface on our 4K TV; playing games at this resolution is not optimal mainly because of the performances when using a single card but we would also like to remind of the limitation of 30Hz at this resolution, which also creates lag when moving the mouse cursor; playing videos though at this resolution should not be an issue.
Since the launch of the new Nvidia Maxwell cards, AMD has performed some price reductions for the R9 series and despite the higher power consumption of the Hawaii architecture, we still think that the HIS R9 290X Turbo is a competitive card. This model can be further overclocked even without increasing the stock voltages:
The tested card is available online for about 390 Euros.
We would like to thank again to HIS for making this review possible!