HIS are the fastest growing graphics card manufacturer in Europe, and as their 9800 Pro card was the clear victor in our recent 9800 Pro shootout, this comes as no surprise. Quick off the mark with XT based solutions in both 9600 and 9800 guises, I am happy to review their 9800XT based flagship solution today. This is the third Radeon 9800XT we have reviewed here at OcPrices, so we will not be dwelling too much on the architecture of this card. Suffice to say that it follows the reference design exactly, and thus comes clad with the same substantial copper cooler we saw when looking at the ATi card a few weeks ago. Clock speeds are fully where you would expect them to be for a 9800XT based card, at 412 / 730 for the core and memory respectively.
The HIS box is an attractive one, with the helmet style central logo is in keeping with the Excalibur brand name of the HIS line of ATi based graphics cards. Inside the box you get:
- An instruction manual
- A Halflife 2 voucher – fully redeemable for a copy of the game once released
- A 6-in-1 game bundled CD
- Drivers
- Power DVD 5
- Power Director 2.5 VE
- An S-Video Cable
- A Composite Cable
- S-Video to Composite convertor
- DVI to VGA Adaptor
- Molex Power splitter cable
Not a bad bundle, but not quite as feature packed as the Asus card we looked at last week, which came with some excellent Asus-only extras. You can buy the HIS based solution all over Europe for a price of around £370 inc VAT, which puts at a similar price point to all other 9800XT cards.
