HIS 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo 1GB PCIe Graphics Card

Test Setup

A common mistake made when benchmarking graphics cards is that the rest of the PC system isn’t sufficient enough to test the GPU to its limits. This results in a bottleneck situation, where the system can only run at the speed of its slowest component. For this reason, the test configuration chosen below has been specially selected to give each of the graphics cards on test the headroom they require in order to produce the best results.

CPU
Intel Core2Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz @ 3.6 Ghz

Motherboard
ASUS P5Q Deluxe (P45)

Memory
Cellshock DDR2 PC-2 6400 5-5-5-18 @ 800mhz

Power Supply
Tuniq Ensemble 1200w

Graphics Drivers
NVidia Forceware 180.48
ATI Catalyst 8.12.72276

Operating System
Windows Vista 64bit SP1

A selection of games and benchmark suites has also been chosen to test each of the graphics cards used in today’s review on several different game engines. Each of the cards will be run at both low and high resolutions with varying levels of texture filtering to represent the use of the card with both small and large screen sizes.

3DMark05
1024×768 / 0xAA
1680×1050 / 4xAA
1920×1200 / 4xAA

3DMark06


1280×1024 / 0xAA
1680×1050 / 4xAA
1920×1200 / 4xAA

3DMark Vantage
Performance Mode
High Mode
Extreme Mode

ET:Quake Wars
1440×900 / High / 4xAA
1680×1050 / High / 4xAA
1920×1200 / High / 4xAA

Unreal Tournament III
1440×900 / DX10
1680×1050 / DX10
1920×1200 / DX10

Call of Duty 4
1440×900 / Max / 4xAA
1680×1050 / Max / 4xAA
1920×1200 / Max / 4xAA

Farcry 2
1440×900 / Max / 4xAA
1680×1050 / Max / 4xAA
1920×1200 / Max / 4xAA

Racedriver GRID
1440×900 / High / 4xAA
1680×1050 / High / 4xAA
1920×1200 / High / 4xAA

Crysis
1440×900 / DX10 / High / 4xAA
1680×1050 / DX10 / High / 4xAA
1920×1200 / DX10 / High / 4xAA

Overclocking

Using the “Auto-Tune” facility built into the ATI Overdriveâ„¢ driver control panel, the maximum overclock we were able to obtain from the HIS HD 4870 IceQ4+ Turbo was 780MHz on the core and 1090MHz on the memory. Attempting to manually increase either of these settings any higher instantly resulted in artifacting and/or game freezing. Granted that this is only a small increase on the stock 770MHz / 1000MHz speeds of the card, but it certainly shows that HIS are quite fearless with their factory overclocking.

Testing the card at both its stock and our overclocked settings in 3DMark Vantage Performance mode reveals that this small increase in speed on the core and memory certainly wasn’t fruitless.