HIS Radeon HD 4870 IceQ4+ Turbo 1GB
Next up is another pre-overclocked Radeon HD 4870 1GB, this time from HIS.
The company throws away the reference heatsink and straps on the IceQ4+ cooler, promising better thermal and aural performance.
Driven by heatpipes, the actual heatsink and fan aren't that different from the reference design.
But you just know that a card dubbed Turbo has some tasty pre-overclocking, and the IceQ4+ version ships with a 770MHz core - 5MHz lower than XFX's - and GDDR5 memory running at an effective 4,000MHz - 200MHz higher than you know what. Conjecturing with respect to performance, the HIS offering should be just a touch faster.
We found the cooler to be a little noisy when idling in Windows and fairly noisy under load, which is kind of surprising given how previous IceQ iterations have performed.
1GB's worth of super-fast GDDR5 is carried on the topside. On a purely aesthetic note, we like the blue PCB and cooler, reckoning that it's a better looker than the XFX card.
The side-on shot shows the two heatpipes that help ferry heat away from the GPU and out of the back of the card.
For what it's worth, and we don't reckon it's worth much at all, HIS ships the card with gold-plated DVI connectors. Both connectors support HDCP, dual-link, and audio passthrough.
