HIS pushes Radeon into a hi-fi world

HIS LAUNCHED its 2400 and 2600 series of product last week and did not stay in reference board lu-lu land. Its engineers came up with a new approach, modifying the looks and improving the features of their offering.

Under a slogan "Hi-fi for High-Def", HIS launched a series of five HD2600 cards that feature a modified PCB (Printed Circuit Board) in blue, with black-coloured backplate and gold-plated connectors. This series presents the first appearance of blue in the world of ATI since Hercules launched its Radeon 8500, some five years ago.

HD2600 line-up consists of two HD2600Pro boards, Pro Fan and IceQ Turbo Edition. The Pro Fan Ed. sports a regular cooler, while IceQ Turbo Ed. ships with dual-slot cooling, clocked to 650MHz for the GPU and 1050MHz (525 MHz DDR) DDR2 memory. Both boards are available in 256 and 512MB flavours.

HIS adds hi-fi to HD graphics

For the XT part, the HD2600XT Zalman Edition comes with Zalman's VF100AlCu single-slot fan and is clocked regularly - 800MHz for the GPU, while GDDR-3 memory is ticking at 700MHz DDR (1.4GHz). the IceQ Turbo Edition comes with Arctic Cooling-style dual-slot cooler, and the clock is correspondingly higher, but was not disclosed.

The HD2600XT GDDR4 Edition also sports the aforementioned improvements, so it will be interesting to see how it will fare against the competition.

When it comes to the 2400 series, with the recent price decrease, HIS considers it more important to offer affordable HD2600 products, and the HD2600Pro Fan Edition offers more performance than HD2400XT.

The company has 2400 series boards, but they don't come with gold-plated connectors. It seems that HIS is well aware of the absymal performance offered by GPUs that sport the 64-bit memory interface.

New Hi-fi products are coming out next week, so if you plan on putting an HD2600 card into an HTPC machine, you might want to consider these upcoming gold-plated sparklers. µ