Introduction

Outside of the HD 7970, we've seen companies jump straight on the upgraded cooler bandwagon almost instantly since the launch of the HD 7000 series. Of all the brands there are a few key coolers that stand out to us, though, and the popular IceQ series from HIS is one of them.

The latest card to get the IceQ treatment from the team over at HIS comes in the form of the HD 7870 IceQ Turbo. When it comes to HIS cards, this is a model that carries our two favorite words. "IceQ" that lets us know we're dealing with a new cooler and "Turbo" which lets us know we're dealing with a pre-overclocked card.

While we'll get into more details on the overclock soon, because the Turbo clock on offer from the HIS card was similar to that of the PowerColor PCS+ HD 7870 we've just looked at, we figured we'd fire up some overclocking software and see how the new HD 7870 goes in the overclocking department; an area we haven't looked in yet.

Of course before we cover all that we need to do a few things first. We'll start by checking out the package HIS are offering us today before we move on to the card itself. Once we've done that we'll take a look at the default clocks and then also what we overclocked the card to.

From there it's time to look at our testbed, check out some of the other cards we'll be including in our graphs today and finally get into the performance side of things to see just what we can get out of this card from HIS. The main question we want to answer today, though, is how does this mid $300 card go against its big brothers sitting in the HD 7900 area.

Package

The box doesn't hold any surprises, but the content of it does. To be honest this is a really light package for what we would consider a top end mid-range video card. We've got the normal paperwork and driver CD along with a DVI to VGA connector, CrossFire Bridge and the new "Weight Lifter" that HIS have started to bundle.

What we're not seeing, though, is any MiniDP convertors or even a HDMI one. A lot of people might not have any use for these and if HIS are able to come in at a slightly more aggressive price point, then we don't mind. In the end we're sure they're going to let the card do the talking more than the bundle.