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Published: October 7, 2008 | Source: HIS | Author: James Napier

HIS HD 4850 IceQ 4 TurboX 512MB PCI-E Graphics Card

Introduction & Specifications
 
HIS LogoWhen AMD introduced the 4800 series several months ago, everyone was hoping for a GPU that had fairly low heat output and thus wouldn’t require the “leaf blower” style cooling found on most of their previous GPU’s dating back to the X1950 series. Unfortunately, despite AMD’s efforts to tame the lower-end HD 4850 with a copper based single-slot solution, those of us who dabble in the art of overclocking were less than impressed by its near-boiling-point load temperatures that hindered any decent increase in clock speeds. Thankfully some AIB’s stepped in with their own custom cooling, HIS being one of the few.
 
Not a name that all of us will be familiar with due to their fairly low key presence in the UK market, HIS is actually one of the longest running graphics card manufacturers in the industry. Formed in 1987 with headquarters based in Hong Kong, HIS is a tier-one ATI/AMD partner with many well known products and trademarks such as IceQ, iCooler, iFan and TURBO Edition under their belt. Here’s some words from the profile pages of their website:
 
HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality graphic cards in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to “Glorifying God”. Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors.
 
Year 2002 marked a milestone in HIS’s history, with “Excalibur” as the encore product for the company. The “HIS Excalibur Graphics Board” proved its name by passing the vigorous and stringent testing of the widely recognized media worldwide. Not only so, but has been crowned with various honors such as: Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech and PC Magazine. In Sept 2003, HIS incorporated the state-of-the art Supreme Cooling Technology in the award winning HIS Excalibur 9800Pro IceQ which became the HIS IceQ, IceQ II and now the IceQ 3 Series. Since then, this product has been the limelight in the market for its outstanding performance and features over the other rivals.
 
Today we’ve been given the opportunity to take a look at their HD 4850 IceQ 4 TurboX card. While we don’t want to spoil the surprise on exactly what this card has in store, the rather long name suggests that the card not only has a custom cooling solution (IceQ) in its fourth revision, but is also overclocked well in excess of the reference design. Let’s take a look…
 
HIS introduces the HIS HD 4850 IceQ 4 TurboX 512MB (256bit) GDDR3 PCIe, featuring the 4th generation of the award-winning IceQ cooling technology. Thanks to the newly designed double-slot fans and heatsink, HIS IceQ 4 effectively dissipate the heat from the GPU, thus enabling it for high levels of performance……
 
• The World’s fastest HD4850
• Powered by Radeon® HD 4850 GPU
• Innovative IceQ 4 Cooling technology
• 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
• 800 stream processing units
• DirectX® 10.1
• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
• Use up to four discrete cards with an AMD 790FX based motherboard
• PCI Express® 2.0 support

• Memory Size (MB): 512
• Memory Type: GDDR3
• RAMDAC (MHz): 400
• Engine CLK (MHz): 685
• Memory CLK (MHz): 2200
• Memory Interface (bit): 256

 
HIS claim that the IceQ 4 TurboX is “The World’s fastest HD4850” and with its GPU and GDDR3 memory clocked at 685 / 2200MHz respectively we’re certainly not going to disagree. Sure it might not quite be up there with the 700MHz stock clocked core of its GDDR5 based bigger brother, but with a 60MHz overclock on the core and 212MHz on the memory, the gap will certainly be less pronounced.
 
Let’s move on and take a closer look at the card…