Cool and Quiet: HIS Radeon 9800 Pro

Introduction

HIS equips its Radeon 9800 Pro IceQ with two VGA outputs (DVI/SubD) as well as an Video/S-Video out - standard fare for Radeon 9800 Pro boards. The card is an AGP 8X device and comes equipped with 128 MB of video memory. To cool ATi's notoriously hot-running R350 chip, HIS offers up the IceQ. Based on the VGA Silencer cooling solution produced by Arctic Cooling and consisting of a very large enclosed aluminum heatsink, the device expels the warm exhaust air out of the PCthrough the backplane.

Due to the height of the fan, the card blocks the first PCI slot (dual-slot-solution).

Using a switch on the front of the card, the user can choose between two fan speeds. According to Arctic Cooling, the fan runs very quiet in Silent Mode at only 18dB while keeping the chip a good 20°C cooler than ATi's reference HSF. From our experience with the card during testing, we can confirm that it was barely audible. The memory chips are also cooled using small passive heatsinks.

A frontal view of the HIS Radeon 9800 Pro IceQ.

The card's backside