Introduction

Until now we never got around to checking out AMD's Radeon HD 7850 in CrossFire. It was due to a combination with no paired video cards coming in along with just a huge amount of new product launches. It was something that never seemed to happen - that is until today, though.

With the help of HIS we're finally able to get around to testing this configuration via a pair of HD 7850 IceQ X TurboX 2GB cards. These cards are part of not only the IceQ X series, but also the TurboX series as well which means we're not only dealing with an upgraded cooler, but also a good out of the box overclock as we deal with the TurboX model instead of the standard Turbo model.

With the new HD 7970 GHz Edition and NVIDIA now offering the GTX 670 and GTX 680, it's going to be interesting to see how this mid-range model in CrossFire competes against the big single GPU cards in our tests today. As always, though, there are a few things we need to do before we get into the performance of the CrossFire setup we're dealing with today.

The first thing we're going to do is check out the box and open it up to see just what kind of bundle is on offer from HIS. Once we've done that we'll move onto the cards to see how they look, before we get into the specification side of things to find out just what kind of overclock the TurboX offers. Once we've done we check out our testbed and then get into the performance side of things to see what we're able to get out of this CrossFire setup.

Package

Having a look at the box we can see the two main features are highlighted on the box, which are of course the IceQ X and TurboX naming schemes that lets us know about the upgraded cooler and out of the box overclock.

On the back side we see the a lot more detail explaining the features of the IceQ cooler along with mention that higher quality components are used which include Dynamic Phase Control PWM IC, Full Solid State Capacitors and Solid State Choke.

Moving inside we've got the normal driver CD, manual and HIS sticker present along with another CD which includes the iTurbo overclocking software. If you want to have a closer look at that I recommend that you check out our HIS HD 7870 IceQ 2GB in CrossFire article in which we expanded on the iTurbo software on page two.

Along with that we've also got a CrossFire bridge, DVI to VGA connector and a PCIe bridge that HIS have included recently to help keep the video card stable in your system.