Rating: 8.0.

1. Introduction 2. HIS HD7950 IceQ 3. HIS HD7950 IceQ (Super High Res Gallery) 4. HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo 5. HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo (Super High Res Gallery) 6. Testing Methodology 7. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark 8. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage 9. Synthetic: 3DMark 11 10. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.0 11. Gaming: F1 2011 (1080p) 12. Gaming: Alien V Predator (1080p) 13. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 2 (1080p) 14. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (1080p) 15. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (1200p) 16. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (1080p) 17. Gaming: Dirt ShowDown (5760x1080) 18. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (5760x1080) 19. Gaming: Max Payne 3 (5760x1080) DX11 20. Technical: Thermal Dynamics 21. Technical: Acoustics Performance 22. Technical: Power Consumption 23. Technical: Overclocking 24. Closing Thoughts 25. View All Pages

If you are thinking of upgrading your system before Christmas then we have two highly modified graphics cards on test today from HIS which should prove interesting. The HIS HD 7950 IceQ is competitively priced at £239.99 and features a large custom cooler and out of the box overclocked speeds. The high end HIS HD 7970 IceQ X² Turbo is £100 more expensive and features a two fan cooler with highly overclocked core and memory speeds. The big question needs answered today … are they worth a purchase?

We have reviewed many graphics cards from HIS in the last couple of years and have rated their modified, overclocked solutions quite highly. Thankfully they ditched their ugly translucent blue coolers for more appealing designs this year.



Product HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo HIS HD7950 IceQ AMD HD7870 AMD HD7850 Core Clock speed 1050mhz 925mhz 1000mhz 860mhz Transistors 4.31 billion 4.31 billion 2.8 billion 2.8 billion Stream Processors 2,048 1,792 1,280 1,024 Compute Performance 3.79 TFLOPS 2.87 TFLOPS 2.56 TFLOPS 1.76 TFLOPS Texture Units 128 112 80 64 Texture Fillrate 134.4 GT/s 103.6 GT/s 80 GT/s 55.0 GT/s ROPs 32 32 32 32 Pixel Fillrate 33.6 GP/s 25.6 GP/s 32.0 GP/s 27.52 GP/s Z/Stencil 128 128 128 128 Memory Type 3GB GDDR5 3GB GDDR5 2GB GDDR5 2GB GDDR5 Memory Clock 1,500mhz

1,250mhz 1,200mhz 1,200mhz Memory Data Rate 6.0 GBps 5.0 Gbps 4.8 Gbps 4.8 Gbps Memory Bandwidth 288 GB/s 240 GB/s 153.6 GB/s 153.6 GB/s

The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo is clocked at 1,050mhz core and the 3GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective). The HIS HD7950 IceQ is clocked at 925mhz and the 3GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,250mhz (5Gbps effective). Both cards have the GDDR5 memory connected via a 384 bit memory interface and have 32 ROPS. The HD7950 has 1,792 shaders and the HD7970 2,048 shaders.

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