Of course we paid a quick visit to HiS technology. They where clearly present in the Hong Kong pavilion with a nice booth. I had an appointment with our primary marketing contact Peter. We briefly talked about the success of HiS's products. As HiS always is very keen to hear what the consumer needs and can be improved I found it very funny to notice that Peter was interviewing me more then I was asking him questions. This is one of the reasons why I love HiS products so much. They want to know how they can improve the products and I'm proud to say that Guru3D.com had a small part to do with that as in the past we discussed many issues and ideas already. Some of them are actually implemented into the products.

HiS is about innovation and putting a product out there that the enthusiast consumer would like to buy. Our latest x800 XL review was a good example of that, there is little to improve for them. It makes their product not among the cheapest, but places their products way above the rest. And I think this is just fantastic.

Let's have a look at the two photo's below:

A lot of people took it for granted, but what you see right there is the HiS x850 XT AGP version, that's right. This is the bridged (codename Rialto) version to make the silicon AGP 8x compatible.

I was able to get my hand on a x800 sample and with the heatsink and some protection rubber removed there she is, that is Rialto. The new bridge chip from ATI. Quite weird to see that last year ATI was laughing hard at NVIDIA for using a bridge chip while their 'native' solution was the better answer in their opinion.

ATI learned something the hard way, it's cheaper to include an extra bridge chip. As you do not have to redesign every new GPU/VPU with AGP compatibility. So ATI can use the same GPU/VPU on a PCI-Express as on an AGP card, the cheap to produce bridge chip can make any PCI-Express chip compatible in no time at low costs.

It was good to finally meet the guys from HiS, keep a keen eye them as they are going to grow big.