A couple of weeks ago Guru3D received an email from HiS technology with the request if they would like to review their new AGP8x based Radeon x850 XT and x850 XT Platinum Edition. Both products tested today come with the very chilly IceQ II cooling package that means a large but very silent cooler. For the standard Radeon x850 XT model additional iTurbo overclocking software is included, which makes the product run as fast as a Platinum Edition within the click of a mouse button, a very cool feature. They take it through a nice photo-shoot and multiple benchmarks with the best poosible settings. The result ? Yeah .. of course it's sweet stuff. If you have the processor to juice it up though!
Also quite important for some excellent HDTV usage, a component 3-way RCA cable. Connect the card to a nice LCD or Plasma screen and you can play HDTV games or playback movies on that big screen. The cards themselves then. It's quite hard to determine real changes at PCB level over the reference model as the cooler is blocking my view! I can tell you though that HiS is following reference design precisely. The trick however is faster memory and the cooling technology, which is called IceQ-II, which we'll get into in a minute.

Compared to the PCI-Express (PCX from now on) make note of the fact that these x850's do not have dual-DVI. Finally a difference. You'll get a VGA/CRT and DVI-I connector.
View: The 17 Page Article @ Guru3D


Here are some key features of "Exact Audio Copy":
  • Usage of the Windows 95 and Windows NT ASPI Interface, so both SCSI and ATAPI CD-ROM drives are supported
  • Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction)
  • Secure, fast and burst extraction methods selectable. Fast extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization.
  • Read error and complete loss of sync detection and correction in secure modes, as far as possible
  • Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and listen to these positions
  • Copy of ranges of music data, not only tracks
  • Automatic Speed reduction on errors and fallback afterwards
  • Normalization of extracted audio
  • Usage of the Windows Audio Compression Manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression e.g. to MP3 waves
  • Support for the BladeEnc DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for online MP3 compression
  • Support of external MP3, VQF, RA and AAC encoders for automatic compression after extraction
  • Batch compression and decompression of/to WAV files
  • Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression
  • Detection of pre-track gaps
  • Detection of silence in pre-track gaps
  • Automatic creation of CUE sheets for CDRWin, including all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC
  • CD player functionality and prelistening to selected ranges
  • Automatic detection of drive features, whether a drive has an accurate stream and/or does caching
  • Sample Offsets for drives with no accurate streams, including the option of filling up missing samples with silence
  • Option for synchronizing tracks for non-accurate stream drives
  • Filename editing with local and remote CDDB database and cdplayer.ini support and more features like ID3 tagging
  • Browse and edit local database
  • Certified Escient CDDB(TM) Compatible
  • Local CDDB support
  • Record and Loop Record functions for recording from LP, radio, etc.
  • Automatic rename of MP3 files according to their ID3 tag
  • Catalog extraction function
  • Multisession (CD-Extra) support
  • CD-Text support
  • CD-Write support for some drives
  • ID3 Tag editor with drag and drop possibility from track listing and database
  • Glitch removal after extraction
  • Small WAV editor with the following functionality: delete, trim, normalize, pad, glitch removal, pop detection, interpolation of ranges, noise reduction, fade in/out, undo (and more)
  • Program is Cardware, so feel free to copy



There are 4 additional comments
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(2 replies) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #1 Posted by SFalcon on 11 May 2005 - 15:47
QUOTE
Compared to the PCI-Express (PCX from now on)


Sigh...
Quote this comment #1.1 Posted by Neobond on 11 May 2005 - 15:52
Cheer up! I know the difference between PCI-X and PCIe
Quote this comment #1.2 Posted by rIaHc3 on 11 May 2005 - 16:32
It takes away the credability from the review
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #2 Posted by 64Bit_Oddity on 11 May 2005 - 15:54
Just half the reviewers dont....
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