The Card

The HIS X700 IceQ is dominated by the IceQ heatsink and heat extractor. Air is pulled in by the large fan at the back and drawn across the heatsink fins and then out the back of the case. The size of the cooling unit forces it to take up two case riser slots. In our test system, the neighbouring PCI slot was completely covered, and the one next to that was effectively unusable. That's a sizable physical footprint, and substantially greater than most other cards based on the X700 chipset.

To power the IceQ hardware, external power is required by means of a four-pin connector, of the same type used to power floppy disk drives. Again, this is a fairly unique feature in X700-based cards which don't natively require extra power beyond that supplied by through the bus.

The back of the card sports the ATI Rialto chip, which translates what is essentially a PCI-Express card to AGP. Outputs are DVI, analogue and S-Video.