14 DAY TRIAL // People who may have thought that things had fallen a bit too silent on the graphics cards market now have something more or less new to look at, even if it is only a revision of Radeon's HD 6870 board.
The video card market is probably one of the most extensive sub-segments of the IT industry, especially if one counts video compute accelerators.
This is because, even though NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices are really the only ones who actually own the field, they have so many manufacturing partners that, for each reference board, there are dozens of custom models.
In this particular instance, it is HIS (Hightech Information System) that has stepped into the spotlight, having developed the Radeon HD 6870 IceQ 1GB.
The name is, as one can easily recognize, quite self-explanatory (it says what card, what cooler and what memory it has).
The HD 6870 was designed as a board for the upper levels of the mainstream consumer market, so 1 GB of memory is more than enough, especially since it is of the GDDR5 VRAM variety.
Meanwhile, the rest of the specifications are more or less identical to the stock ones, from the 1,120 stream processors, to the GPU frequency of 900 MHz.
Also, the aforementioned memory has a clock speed of 4,200 MHz and operates on an interface of 256 bits.
It is the IceQ cooler that offers the difference between the new board and its other incarnations, the same way IceQ did, and does, for other NVIDIA and AMD graphics adapters.
It uses four copper heatpipes and a single fan to disperse heat, all in a dual-slot package, for an average temperature about 24 degrees lower than the original video controller.
An extra advantage lies in the fact that the level of noise is reduced as well (by 10 dB).
As reported, the CrossFireX-ready product, complete with dual-DVI, dual mini DisplayPort and HDMI, is already up for order in Canada, at a price of $219.99, which is the rough equivalent of 217 USD and 160 Euro.