14 DAY TRIAL // HIS has just announced that it expanded its graphics card portfolio with the addition of two new Radeon HD 6970 solutions which feature the company's trademark IceQ cooler for quieter operation and better thermal performances.
Both of these cards share the same cooling solution and PCB design, but the Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo comes factory overclocked, while its smaller brother, the HIS 6970 IceQ, strictly follows AMD reference frequencies.
The IceQ cooler HIS installed on these cards uses four copper heatpipes in order to draw the heat away from the Cayman XT GPU and into an aluminum heatsink.
This is then cooled by a turbine fan, which also blows fresh air over the card's VRM heatsink.
HIS states that thanks to this cooling solution, the cards are up to 23°C cooler and also quieter than the reference design, although it's pretty hard to believe that the small blower fan installed can significantly decrease the noise over that of the stock HD 6970.
The Radeon HD 6970 is based on the Cayman XT core and it features 1536 stream processors, 96 texture units, 32 ROP units as well as a 256-bit wide memory bus that is connected to a 2GB video buffer.
The standard clocks of the cards, and those of the vanilla HIS 6970 IceQ, are set at 880MHz for the core, while the memory is working at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective).
The second HIS graphics card, the factory overclocked Turbo version has its core running at 900MHz, while the VRAM's frequency is set at 1400MHz (5.6GHz data rate).
HIS has decided to pair the Radeon HD 6970 IceQ and IceQ Turbo with two dual-link DVI, two Mini DisplayPorts and one HDMI video output.
Pricing hasn't been announced yet, but these aren't expected to cost much more than other HD 6970 solutions based on the reference design.