HIS Radeon HD 7850 4GB iPower IceQ Turbo review - Introduction

A mainstream GPU with uber-enthusiast 4GB graphics memory

Alright now, it has been a while since we have tested a Radeon HD 7850, but HIS decided to make a custom PCB, slap 4GB of memory on it, overclock it and then apply a custom high performance cooler on it. So how could we remotely ignore that? You are in for a royal treatment though as we received two cards and as such we can show you Crossfire results as well in a multi-GPU setup.

So we test the HIS Radeon HD 7850 iPower IceQ Turbo as single card and in Crossfire today. The HIS Radeon HD 7850 iPower IceQ Turbois a factory overclocked 4GB Radeon HD 7850 graphics card. Fully customized with 3rd party cooling. We test the product with the hottest games like Battlefield 3, Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Hitman Absolution and many more. The R7850/7870 products from AMD offer good value for money we feel. AMD's partners are very savvy to release graphics cards based on these cute products as they perform well for the money, quite well actually.

For those that missed it or need a little extra information, two graphics cards have been released in the 7800 series:

Pitcairn XT (GPU codename) is the AMD Radeon HD HD7870 - it comes with 20 Compute Units carrying 1280 Stream Processors, 80 texture units and 32 ROPs. The AMD reference core and memory frequencies clock in at an impressive 1000 MHz on the GPU and 1200MHz (4800MHz effective GDDR5) on the memory, this product is equipped with 2GB memory running over a 256-bit memory interface. AMD brands this product the "One GHz Edition" due to the reference clock frequency. This means that AMD's partners can release products clocked even higher.

Pitcairn Pro is the GPU that empowers the Radeon HD 7850, it features 16 Compute Units, 1024 Stream (shader) Processors, 64 texture units and 32 ROPs. Its core and memory frequencies fall behind that of the 7870 but it is still clocked at a good 860 MHz core with 1.20GHz (4800 MHz effective) on the memory. Again, the memory is based on a 256-bit interface.

HIS jumped the 7800 bandwagon as well with several models, and for this review we'll be looking at their Radeon HD 7850 iPower IceQ Turbo edition which comes with a whopping 4 GB of graphics memory.

HIS uses a custom PCB and their IceQ dual-slot cooler making the card very easy to install, chilled down and silent. The graphics card is equipped with two 6-pin PCIe power connectors. As mentioned the card comes factory overclocked, reference products run at 860 MHz, this puppy clocks in at a cool 1 GHz for the core. The memory is clocked at a 4800 MHz reference clock frequency.

Have a peek at the card, and then let's start up this review.