HIS R7 260X iPower IceQ X2 2GB GDDR5 Video Card Review

Videocards/VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2013-11-12

Are you a gamer on a budget? Do you own a 22’’ monitor for playing the latest games or even a 24’’ and would not mind sacrificing some detail levels? Then the HIS R7 260X might be for you since it comes with a custom PCB and cooling system which allows raising the GPU/memory frequencies even further in order to gain some extra FPS.

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Conclusive Thoughts

Time to draw again the line after taking the HIS R7 260 through water and fire; again we are dealing with a custom-built model for achieving better overclocking results, but also a much more efficient cooling system which keeps low noise levels under maximum stress. The card is practically a slightly overclocked Radeon HD 7790 with added (or enabled) features like Mantle, DirectX 11.2 or TrueAudio.

 

HIS usually overclock their cards, but this variant has identical speeds to the stock model. The card becomes attractive though when we raise speeds for both GPU and memory so we were able to exceed the performances of our overclocked XFX Black Edition 7790 which was the speediest Bonaire model we have tested so far:

 

 

 

In order to raise the frequencies, we did not use this time the iTurbo utility since it did not detect the card correctly at the time of the testing and when trying to raise the speeds and Power Limit through Catalyst, the card simply refused to raise its frequencies to 3D speeds and only ran at 2D clocks. After trying more utilities, we have found out that ASUS GPU Tweak worked perfectly for achieving our goal and we were able to max out the memory slider without any issues.

 

The card comes with 2GB instead of 1GB we had on the XFX 7790 BE model and we have seen a clear performance hit at high resolutions when the game benchmarks were exceeding the 1GB buffer present on the card.

 

We would recommend the card for playing the latest games at medium to high detail levels at 1680x1050; when running at Full HD we may need to lower the detail levels most of the time in order to reach playable status.

 

Since there are also overclocked 2GB Radeon HD 7790 models available on the market with custom cooling, we have seen a 3 to 4 Euro difference between this card and the 7790 offerings (the HIS R7 260X IceQ X2 can be had for around 144 Euros).

 

HIS R7 260X iPower IceQ X2 2GB GDDR5 Video Card is Recommended For:

 

We would like to thank again to HIS for making this review possible!

 

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