HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ 4 TurboX Benchmarked

AMD's current mainstream flagship graphics card, the Radeon HD 4850, is probably one of the best deals on the market, with prices ranging from approximately $170 to $250. Given the card's graphics capabilities, it's safe to assume that this is one of ATI's most successful products to date.

However, if you are wondering which of all the available HD 4850-based graphics cards is designed to meet your high-performance requirements, then you should probably check out the offer from HIS, as it has recently received a new member, namely the Radeon HD 4850 IceQ 4 TurboX with 512MB of memory.

 

If you want a better understanding of what this card is capable of, the guys over at Bit-Tech have already put it through its paces and, as it turns out, this could actually be one of the best performance graphics cards based on AMD's Radeon HD 4850 reference model. That is mainly because it combines one of AMD's recently released graphics processing unit with HIS' own IceQ 5 custom cooling solution, in order to deliver an impressive amount of performance, while keeping the card's temperatures down to a minimum.

 

The test system included an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 clocked at 3GHz, an ASUS Maximum Formula motherboard, 4GB of Corsair DDR2 memory, a 200GB Seagate Barracuda HDD, and an Enermax Galaxy DXX PSU with 1000W of power. The NVIDIA test system included the same components, except for the motherboard, which was based on NVIDIA's nForce 780i SLI and was manufactured by XFX.

 

As far as performance goes, the HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ TurboX is slightly better than NVIDIA's GeForce 9800GTX+ in most tests, with both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. As regards the power consumption, the card requires 176 watts in Windows Vista Idle mode with Aero enabled, while it draws 290W of power in full load, running Crysis DX10 at 1680 by 1060 with 0x AA and 0x AF.