HIS Radeon HD 7970 6GB IceQ X2 (Dual GPU) Video Card Review

Introduction

In October of last year we looked at the PowerColor Devil 13 HD 7990 6GB video card which brought with it two HD 7970 cores on a single PCB to make for an absolutely massive video card. We found ourselves extremely impressed with what PowerColor offered us, but found ourselves a little disappointed that it was tested just before we introduced our new benchmark line up.

Thinking that it was probably the first and last card of this type we'd see it was a little upsetting that we wouldn't get a chance to see how this dual GPU offering would perform in our updated benchmarks. Jump forward just a couple of months, though, and we find ourselves looking at another dual GPU offering based on the HD 7970.

This particular one comes from HIS and falls under the IceQ naming scheme which as we've mentioned before is one we really enjoy. What does the IceQ name mean to a video card that has such a large focus on power, though? Well there's only one way to find out.

Normally the first thing we'd do from here is check out the bundle to see what exactly HIS is offering us. Because this card hasn't hit retail yet, though, the final retail package hasn't been organized. Instead we've just got a black box and the card itself. It's fairly safe to assume we'll see a fairly standard HIS bundle, though, with a couple of convertors and power connectors. The normal line up of paperwork a driver CD and no doubt another CD that will include the iTurbo software. Of course we can't say with 100% accuracy this is what we're going to see, but it's a fairly safe assumption.

Because we don't have the package to look at we'll instead jump straight into the card itself where we'll take a look at what exactly HIS is offering us today. Once we've done that we'll head into the specification side of things to take a closer look at the clocks before we finally get into our testbed section.

We'll quickly cover our testbed and from there we'll quickly talk about the cards that we'll be including in our graphs here today before we of course get into the performance side of things to see just what this beasty dual GPU video card is capable of doing.