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HIS Radeon HD 6870 IceQ X Turbo X Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts
This card was set to be a hopeful contender from the offset with its amazing figures and pre-overclocks on paper. Though we were quite disappointed when it came to testing and in a majority of benchmarks the card came in with worse results than the stock reference card, and the Gigabyte equivalent card came out on trumps throughout most. There were a few tests where this card did shine in regards to the frame rates that were offered up including Dirt 2 and Metro 2033.

We did notice that the card did come into its own in a couple of tests, giving close performance to the 6950 set of cards, with this being a VERY close contender to the 6950 1GB card.

Price wise, this card will set you back around £170, which we feel is quite expensive based on the performance, though some games does challenge this statement. There are some more upsides to this card which mainly refer to the cooler and overall design. The cooler showed some promising figures in regards to idle and load fan noise and acoustics and didn’t go above 53% RPM when running an intensive test like FurMark. The cooling on the card was also shown to be within reasonable limits and was actually quite surprising with the card not going above 65 degrees Celsius on load and sitting at a comfortable 34 degrees Celsius on idle.

We feel the HIS Radeon 6870 IceQ X Turbo X graphics card is a hit or miss, and will entirely depend on which games your hoping to run as to what kind of results you will get. This isn’t a problem with the HIS card, but more of the 6870 set of GPUs in general. This is why most people tend to spend that little bit extra to get the 6900 series card, and you may or may not want to know, but HIS do supply a 6950 IceQ X Turbo X card to the market, but this comes at an extra premium, but in our opinion, is well worth it.

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