The Card

Moving away from the box and onto the video card itself you can see that the IceQ X2 cooler stands out straight away with its dual fan setup. We've got a honeycomb X in the middle with the HIS logo and on each side you can see an 8.9cm fan. Behind the fans you can see the massive heatsink and if we look at the top and bottom of the card you can see a number of heatpipes present to help pull heat away from the GPU core.

As we move around you can see a typical dual power setup. Instead of the typical 6-pin + 8-pin PCIe power connector setup, we've got a dual 8-pin PCIe power connector setup. This all goes along with the new iPower feature that HIS have implemented into some of its latest cards.

iPower ultimately brings with it higher quality power which in turn brings with it higher quality overclocking ability. On the card we're looking at today the most obvious physical aspect is the power connectors that we just mentioned. What that does is move the current output from 200 amps which is seen on a reference HD 7970 to 235 amps on this video card.

The PWM phase setup is also improved moving from a 5+1+1 setup for a total of seven to a 6+1+1 setup bringing that number to eight. We should see a strong overclock and strong performance as a result.

When it comes to the I/O side of things you can see that typical HD 7970 setup which consists of a Dual-Link DVI connector, HDMI port and two Mini DisplayPort connectors. Across the top you can see a vent that is designed to let hot air escape out the back of your case.

Specifications

Out of the box this HIS offering follows the standard GHz Edition clocks which means that the core comes in at 1050MHz while the 3GB of GDDR5 carries a clock speed of 6000MHz QDR. Because we've already looked at a couple of GHz Edition based video cards in the past at reference clocks, we figured that we'd take the chance today to see what happens on the overclocking side of things. It should be interesting considering the work HIS has put into the iPower side of this product, as discussed above.

We ended up pushing the core up to an impressive 1205MHz. As for the 3GB of GDDR5 memory we pushed that from 6000MHz QDR to 6800MHz QDR. This should bring with it some strong performance gains - we'll find out just what it was capable of doing in a moment, over the next several benchmark test pages.