Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
For under 250 EUR HIS brings a really fun card to the mainstream market with the 7850 ICEQX TURBOX model. Admittedly, it's not the most aesthetically pleasing product to look at though. I mean the cooler design is not bad but the honeycomb mesh chrome plastic plating makes the cooler look a little cheap TBH.
But for those without an open or windowed side panel well you'd probably wouldn't care. Fact is though that the card is amongst the fastest factory clocked 7850 SKUs available on the market, and that shows as it is performing at 7870 level. On the GeForce side of things, it's kissing and hugging 100% with the GeForce GTX 480 as comparison to its rendering performance. And that's not bad, not bad at all.
So though while aesthetically the cooler looks do not appeal to me, it certainly does work well enough. During gaming that means the GPU will stay around or under 60 Degrees C. Combine that with the fact that the cooler's noise levels are normal makes it win in my book.
The retail price for this product is roughly 245 EUR and that we think is a very fair amount of money for what you get offered.
For that money you get to play your PC games at 1920x1080/1200 pretty darn well. Just set your image quality preference and the cards will push very nice framerates. If we look at the RTS genre with Anno 2070 at 1920x1200, we get a good 55+ FPS on average with the product. That game is locked in at the very best image quality settings with 4x AA enabled.
Battlefield 3 then, here's where we enabled that near silly Ultra quality settings mode and 4x AA. Now the R7850 is a little on the edge here with 35 FPS on average. With our IQ settings and chosen level these are downright respectable numbers compared to other products in the same price range. If you need a little more performance, you can always disable AA.
When you look at the overall package, performance, the new Eyefinity updates, PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all other stuff then we can only conclude that we happily embrace the Radeon HD 7800 series in the mainstream to enthusiast graphics card arena. For those that embrace multi-monitor gaming, it's for you guys that AMD decided to go for the 2GB framebuffer / graphics memory.
Overclocking then, as you have noticed from the reference article and now this review, the 7850 cards are tweaking gems, fact remains that the cards is already factory overclocked towards 1 GHz. Manual overclocking on top of that did not yield into a whole lot more and we stranded at roughly 1100 MHz. But remember, if you compare that all the way back from the reference 860 MHz clock frequency, and that's a 240 MHz difference (compared to the reference baseline clocks).
Concluding then. The HIS Radeon HD 7850 ICEQ TURBOX edition graphics card works out well. It does not have the best looks, that is the one remark I need to make. If you are not bothered by that them I find the 7850 ICEQ TURBOX edition to be a pretty nice product really. The overall package is good from noise to heat towards performance and features like monitor connectors. The product carries a factory set higher clock frequency making it a very decent gaming graphics card for anyone with a monitor up-to 1920x1080. Priced at 245 EUR we feel it's a fair deal we can recommend, albeit if you can spot it for 225 EUR or lower it would simply be a great deal. Recommended.
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