For its previous products, HIS used Arctic Cooling's VGA Silencer cooler, a very convincing and highly effective cooling solution. Although the new IceQ II's bears a strong resemblance to the VGA Silencer, it is indeed a new design. One improvement is how the new IceQ II also cools the card's memory modules, whichthe older version did not. HIS quotes a median noise level of 0.5 Sone, which makes the IceQ II cooler a good 40% quieter than ATi's reference cooler while at the same time keeping the graphics processor 30% cooler.
The massive IceQ II cooler, made by Arctic Cooling.
Unlike the IceQ (I), the new card no longer features a switch on the backpanel to change the fan speed. Instead, the speed is now determined automatically by the card (iTurbo). A large heatsink provides cooling for the remaining memory modules on the back of the card. Due to the height of this heatsink and its protruding screws, some motherboards with especially high components such as capacitors might have trouble fitting the card. Speaking of space, the IceQ II is a dual-slot cooling solution, so make sure the PCI slot adjacent to the AGP is unoccupied.
A large heatsink cools the GDDR3 memory modules on the back of the card.
The principle behind the IceQ II is as simple as it is effective: A large heatsink is placed over the graphics processor and the memory modules to dissipate the heat. A large, slow-spinning fan at one end of the card blows air over and through the heatsink, expelling the warm air out of the computer case at the other end of the card through the card's backplane.
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