The HIS company has been around since 1987 and is known for manufacturing graphic cards with integrated ATI GPUs, thus being one of ATI's most important partners. As soon as ATI releases a new GPU solution, HIS is one of the first graphics cards manufacturers that can release a model based on that GPU. Their line of ATI-based graphics cards is diversified by BUS type, namely AGP and PCI Express editions, and also stretches back to some of the Radeon first models.



One of their latest releases is a HD 3850 based graphics cards, which makes use of the performance rated ATI's 3800 series GPU. The card is meant to be one of the fastest HD 3850 solutions available at the moment and one of HIS graphic cards that use their own IceQ Turbo cooling system. The IceQ Turbo versions of HIS graphic cards deal with an improved cooler and quieter fan, and a 2 slot design.



Thus, although the card can provide better performance with lower temperatures, it will physically take up on more slots on your motherboard. And if you consider on acquiring one such card, it would be nice to have a motherboard that can support at least one x16 PCI Express slot. Two would be even nicer, as the card is capable of running in a ATI Crossfire configuration.



Taking a look at the performance stats, we see that the card has a total of 512MB of GDDR3 memory, which is built on a 256bit memory interface. The card is also designed to provide a total of 320 stream processors, thus making the life of a system CPU a lot more easier. The HD 3850 IceQ 3 TurboX graphic card is built to withhold the stress of any game out there, as it comes with support for Microsoft's DirectX 10.1.



The overall aspect of the card seems interesting enough, but the bottom question is: can it surpass some of NVIDIA's GeForce8 GPU's and still come at a price tag of approximate $220?