Introduction

Just as it felt like we wouldn't really see any new video cards for the remainder of the year, we got a nice box from HIS with a couple of new variations from the company with the first one being the Radeon HD 7850 IceQ 2GB.

We've always been a fan of the AMD models after the HD 7800 series since they've brought some excellent performance at a strong price point. The HD 7700 series on the other hand got off to a bit of a rocky start due to the high price tag it launched with. We always felt that the HD 7700 series was going to struggle to really gain momentum as it wasn't just us who felt this way. With just about every review saying it was a good product, but just priced too high. It was a stigma that stuck with the model and has never been shaken.

The HD 7800 series alongside the higher end HD 7900 series hasn't been plagued with such issues. Instead the HD 7850 came in only a little more expensive than the HD 7770, but did an excellent job of separating itself enough to make it look a lot more desirable.

As always there's a few things we've got to do before we get into the performance side of things today and the first is see what's going on with the bundle. Once we've done that we'll move onto the video card itself where we'll check out the IceQ cooler before looking at the specification side of things. Once we've done that we'll move straight into the performance side of things and see just what the HIS HD 7870 IceQ 2GB is able to do.

Package

We've got clear labeling of the model here and you can see some of the main features on the front of the box. Turning over the box you can see more of the features that are on offer with a description with what they bring to the table.

Getting into the package you can see it's a fairly typical HIS bundle with a driver CD and a second CD which includes the iTurbo software. Alongside that we've got a manual, HIS case sticker, DVI to VGA connector and a CrossFire connector.