15 - The Conclusion
The Verdict
So if you'd take a regular run of the mill Radeon HD 4850 you already have a pretty solid product for sure. Bang for bucks wise that thing is the good stuff. When you then start to improve it and are successful at doing so, then you have a really nice product to offer. HIS technology did that once again. The ICEQ4 cooler is both silent and offers much better than reference cooling performance. Next to that, it looks quite nice as well, throw in a little cold-cathode UV light and the thing will shine up like it's radiated .. lovely to look at.
Next to that the board design is nice as well, sub-standard blue PCB color, nice gold colored DVI shows with black shim, heat sink on the memory and next to that, the card come overclocked as well.
Currently the product as tested today you can buy for roughly 199 USD, standard price .. though the reference products did drop to roughly 179 USD. But hey, for that money you get a much improved cooling solution, and definitely a nice card to have in a slightly pimped up PC. Next to the standard overclock, you can take this product upwards in clock frequency yourself as well. We forced a pretty high overclock yet again increasing framerate while maintaining good overall temperatures. Be sure to at the very least try to overclock the memory just like we did. The 4850 craves and loves memory bandwidth which will yield a better framerate.
You really can't go wrong with that product, no matter what brand you purchase. Let's recap a little, we have been playing Call of Duty 4 at 2560x1600 with 4xAA and all image quality setting maxed out at an average of 35 frames per second.
Another title then, Devil may Cry 4 pushed the card towards great performance and in my favorite new title, Mass Effect more than fast enough even at 1920x1200 where we had an average framerate of almost 50 FPS.
HIS certainly did well with the ICEQ4 TurboX edition of their Radeon HD 4850. It comes customized, slightly overclocked and even then is tweakable.
This product is performing faster than the reference Radeon HD 4850, has really nice cooling and the looks to kill. Highly recommended.
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