1 - Introduction

It is rare in the history of the graphics card industry, that a manufacturer introduces that all new pro-active gaming device, and then procedes to have so much success. The strategy behind the Radeon 4800 series is simple, high performance, at a fair price. I mean face it, you drop 175-199 USD and bam... you receive a card allowing you to play the very latest games at a good screen resolution and great image quality.

For the manufacturers, a little bit of a downside is to be able to do such a thing at a very affordable price, you need to cut away stuff and save money to offer the product as cheap as possible. On the Radeon HD 4850 the problem is very clear, it can get really hot, and it could be a bit more silent yet the biggest downside, thanks to it's cooling, is that the residual heat is dumped inside the PC.

Luckily for us there are always a couple of manufacturers out there who are willing to do things slightly different. HIS technology always has been such a company. Surely they'll sell the regular versions just as well, yet typically a month after the original reference products are unleashed onto the market, HIS comes up with a slightly customized design. The regulars around guru3d and those intrested in the industry all know about the ICEQ concept, that dual-slot cooler based series of graphics cards from which we tested so much in the past already.

It was therefore no surprise to see HIS launch the Radeon HD 4850 512MB with a customized cooler, the new ICEQ4 model. Again very silent, again very good cooling performance and again, great looks. Next to that HIS decided to overclock the card a bit for you as well. Suffice to say, how can it not be a winner ? [Ed - I dont know, why else would there be 15 pages in this review!]

In this review we'll show you all the ins and outs of this product, as usual. Next page please, but not before you had a look at what we are testing today.