Conclusion
Fundamentally, it's hard not to like the HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ4 TurboX 512MB.
For the price of buying a reference Radeon HD 4850 card and an aftermarket cooler, such as the Akasa Vortexx Neo, you can purchase a solution with a decent cooler pre-attached, so no worries about losing your warranty and pre-overclocked to boot. The IceQ4 ships with frequencies of 680MHz core and 2,200MHz memory and our performance numbers show the card's performance to be right between the reference HD 4850 and HD 4870 SKUs
The HIS HD 4850 IceQ4 TurboX 512MB is everything the reference Radeon HD 4850 should have been and more, and as a total package is hard to fault.
The only slight disappointment we experienced was with the limited overclocking headroom on our card, but it goes to show there is only so much uprating a cooler can guarantee, and factors other than heat prove just as much of a barrier.
With a notable performance boost over reference designs and with a £135 etail price, the HIS HD 4850 IceQ4 TurboX is a quality proposition. Recommended if your budget is south of £150.
HEXUS.certification
The HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ4 TurboX 512MB receives the HEXUS.labs certification for successfully completing our benchmark suite without issue.
HEXUS Awards
With the cards premium over reference HD 4850 designs more than made up through both the uprated cooler and increased performance, further to HEXUS.labs certification, the HIS HD 4850 IceQ4 TurboX receives the HEXUS.gaming recommended award.
HIS HD 4850 IceQ4 TurboX 512MB
HEXUS Where2Buy
The HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ4 TurboX 512MB is available for £135 from Scan.co.uk.
As always, UK-based HEXUS.community discussion forum members will benefit from the SCAN2HEXUS Free Shipping initiative, which will save you a further few pounds plus also top-notch, priority customer service and technical support backed up by the SCANcare@HEXUS forum.
The card can also be purchased for the same price at Microdirect.co.uk.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any HIS representatives choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
Andrzej Bania, HIS marketing, was kind enough to submit an HEXUS Right2Reply:
''For a card at £135 to achieve over 35 frames per second at resolutions of 2560x1600 with 4xAA and 16xAF in games like Quake Wars and CoD4 just makes you smile. The pure engineering knowledge used to create the HIS 4850 IceQ TurboX is put in stark relief when you realise that this ‘in-game performance’ has been delivered with the GPU temperature that’s over 15 degrees LOWER than the stock cooler shipped by some manufacturers. As well as the ‘hardcore Turbo products’, HIS is presently putting the finishing touches to some ambitious ‘passively cooled products’ which should be available for serious inspection shortly''
