Introduction

The other day we got the chance to check out the HIS HD 7850 iPower IceQ Turbo 4GB video card and found ourselves impressed with what HIS was able to offer. We were a little skeptical when it came to doubling the memory on a mid-range card. That's no surprise as we find ourselves skeptical on the need to double the memory on the HD 7970 GHz Edition from 3GB to 6GB, as well. The performance difference between both video cards has always been minimal.

We haven't looked a at a ton of CrossFire since we updated our games line up towards the end of last year, so we're looking forward to adding another set of data to our graphs here today. At $279.99 the HIS HD 7850 iPower IceQ Turbo 4GB comes in at a pretty strong price. For a total of $559.98 you should be able to get yourself some strong performance when running two of these HIS cards together.

AMD continue to improve CrossFire performance as the months go on and we're looking forward to seeing how performance looks with the latest Catalyst 13.1 WHQL drivers. Normally there are a few things we need to do before we get into the performance side of things. Because we've already had a look at the HIS HD 7850 iPower IceQ Turbo 4GB in detail, though, we'll simply just be taking the time to have a quick look at GPU-Z to make sure everything looks okay before moving on to our testbed, which will then be followed by us getting stuck into the performance side of things.

If you do want to take a closer look at the card and the bundle then we recommend that you check out our original review of the HIS HD 7850 iPower IceQ Turbo 4GB video card. If you've already looked at it, though, or simply just want to get into the CrossFire performance of this card then let's move onto the testbed now.

As the title suggests we're dealing with Turbo cards here today which means that they come overclocked out of the box. As we mentioned in our original review, while the 4GB of GDDR5 stays at the default 4800MHz QDR, you can see that the core has been bumped up to an even 1000MHz. The main thing we want to check here is that CrossFire is enabled and as you can see across the bottom it is in the form of two GPUs.