His HD4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo graphics card

The IceQ 4 series from His has a custom heatpipe cooling solution, allowing for quieter and more efficient cooling, which in turn allows His to increase clock speeds from the reference design.

The current flagship of the IceQ4 range is the HD4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo, which has an overclocked core engine and 1GB of overclocked GDDR5 memory.

The HD4870 (RV770) GPU is built on a 55nm process and has 800 stream processors running at 750MHz ­ the same as the engine clock.

It supports GDDR5 memory via a 256-bit interface and a 900MHz clock speed but, because of the way GDDR5 works, the effective memory speed is 3,600MHz.

As standard the HD4870 comes with 512MB of memory which gives the HD4870 a bandwidth of a staggering 115.2Gbytes/sec.

His has modestly tweaked both clocks on the IceQ 4+ with the core clock running at 770MHz. It has also doubled the memory to 1GB of GDDR5 as well as overclocking it, the memory clock running at 1,000MHz (4,000MHz effective).

To keep all this running as coolly as possible, the IceQ 4+ cooler comes with a thicker metal cooler base and larger than normal 8mm heatpipes.

To power this beast, His recommends a 500W power supply at least ­ it needs to have two six-pin PCI Express connectors to run normally or, if you run a pair of cards in a Crossfire configuration, four six-pin or two six-pin and two eight-pin connectors.

At a 1,280x1,024 pixel resolution the HD4870 IceQ 4+ scored 15,235 in 3Dmark06 and an impressive 9,610 in the more demanding 3Dmark Vantage. In real-life gaming it produced an average frame rate of 47fps in World in Conflict and 65.49fps in Far Cry 2. At higher resolutions it is still impressive; 59fps for Far Cry 2 at 1,920x1,200 is still very playable.