14 DAY TRIAL // Some of you ATI fans out there must already know that HIS is one of the biggest Radeon integrators on the market. This is because this card manufacturer has succeeded so far in delivering some of the best Radeon-based cards on the market, mostly thanks to the use of its IceQ technology, meant to effectively dissipate the heat from the GPU, thus enabling it for high levels of performance.
One of the company's upcoming HD 4850-based cards is expected to be equipped with the fourth generation of the IceQ cooling solution. In fact, pictures of it have already surfaced on the web, on the donanimhaber website and, from the looks of it, we should expect a dual-slot card.
Considering HIS' previous IceQ graphics cards, the new 4850 should provide an impressive graphics performance, although it is still uncertain whether the card is going to be factory-overclocked. Still, even if it won't come already tweaked, this should not be a huge problem for gaming enthusiasts, who will probably take great pleasure in playing with the card's frequency levels, in order to get a boost of performance.
According to the above-mentioned site, the upcoming card should pack 512MB of GDDR3 memory and could probably hit store shelves sometime in August. Until that time, the price tag it will come with will probably remain unknown - however, most likely, it is going to be set above that of the reference HD 4850 model.
Until AMD decides to roll out its dual-GPU HD 4870 X2 graphics card, the current single-core 4870 is the company's best model in terms of performance. Even more, despite it not being the highest-performance card currently available on the market, it does come fairly close to that. Fortunately, the highly anticipated HD 4870 X2 is touted to be the one to position AMD as the leading high-performance graphics card manufacturer, for the first time in years. This card too is expected to make its debut in August, so it would seem that we're in for a very interesting month.