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Published: December 24, 2008 | Source: HIS | Author: James Napier

HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo 1GB PCIe Graphics Card

Packaging & Card Appearance

While it seems to be a growing trend for manufacturers’ to package their graphics cards inside boxes that barely fit through your front door, HIS have thankfully kept the outer box of the 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo at a reasonable size which will undoubtedly make it easier (and maybe even cheaper?) to ship. The primary colours of the packaging are black and blue, with the IceQ 4+ logo taking centre stage and several general specification stickers aligned to the right.

HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo Box Front HIS 4870 IceQ4 Turbo Box Back
Turning the box over reveals a windowed cutout that serves the purpose of showing off the IceQ 4+ cooler beneath. Several circular images surround this area, pointing out features such as the dual heatpipes; isolated heatsinks for the Memory and GPU; dual slot cooling; gold plated connectors, a larger surface area for improved cooling and finally a durable and UV reactive fan.
HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Inner Box HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo Inner Box

HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo Contents HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo Accessories

Opening the white cardboard inner-box, we can see that HIS have gone to the trouble of placing the graphics card inside a moulded plastic shell. This not only prevents the card from moving around during shipping, but also keeps it well distanced from the edges of the box which often take the brunt of any mishandling by couriers.

The accessories package is fairly basic and contains everything to get you up and running. As shown in the image above, you get a DVI to HDMI converter, a DVI to VGA converter, a Molex to PCI-E cable, a Crossfire bridge and a driver disk. Unfortunately there are no signs of any value added goodies such as the spirit level/screwdriver/torch thingy that HIS included in their 4850 IceQ 4+ Turbo package.

HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Side HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Side

HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ DVI HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Rear
 

At the front of the card you’ll find the standard configuration of two DVI ports and an S-Video port bolted to the dual-slot blanking plate. However, HIS have seen fit to gold plate the connections on the DVI ports and also electroplate the blanking plate in a gunmetal black colour. This combined with the custom blue PCB makes the card look simply awesome.
HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Heatpipes HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Cooler

HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Naked HIS 4870 IceQ4+ Components

 
Using a cooler not dissimilar in appearance to the previous generation of Arctic Cooling’s ‘Silencer’ series, a blower fan mounted at the rear of the card pushes air through copper coloured (but most likely aluminium) fins attached to a base plate. As mentioned earlier in the review, the ‘+’ in the IceQ 4+ name signifies that the cooler has received a slight upgrade from the standard IceQ 4 with a larger GPU surface area, wider heatpipes (from 6mm  to 8mm) and Memory/PWM cooling integrated into the metal base.

Going in for a closer look at the memory modules, we can see that HIS have stuck with the Qimonda GDDR5 “IDGV51-05A1F1C-40X” IC’s used in the reference design. Produced in week 40 of 2008, these IC’s are designed to run at a speed of 3600MHz. However, as we already know, HIS have pushed the chips a further 400MHz to give us a nice round 4000MHz effective memory speed.