HIS Radeon HD 6970 IceQ Turbo 2GB Video Card Review

Card Pictures

Looking at the HIS HD 6970 IceQ Turbo card, you can see the massive cooler that HIS have utilized. Everyone who sees it, though, including myself, seems to say the same thing. They're kik'n it a bit ol' skool with the look of the cooler. It looks very much like the cooler we saw on the IceQ cards years ago when it comes to the general look, but of course it's been heavily upgraded with heat pipes, new fan and a massive heatsink.

The card looks the part and it will be interesting to see what kind of performance we're able to achieve out of the model when it comes to overclocking.

Looking around the card and moving to the top, you're not going to see anything that you haven't seen before when it comes to the overall design. We've got a single 6-Pin and 8-Pin PCI-E power connector at the back of the card, while closer to the front we've got a pair of CrossFire connectors.

Without an extended Crossfire bridge, making use of one Crossfire connector may be a little hard. It would've been nice if HIS included one in the package like we've seen from MSI and the Lightning series in the past which use large coolers.

Looking at the connectivity side of things, there's no real surprises. We've got two DVI ports, one HDMI and two Mini DisplayPort connectors.

Specifications

Out of the box HIS have bumped the core up from 880MHz to 900MHz and the 2GB of GDDR5 from 5500MHz QDR too 5600MHz QDR. It's not the biggest overclock, so because of that we've decided to fire up Afterburner and overclock the card ourselves to see what kind of performance we're able to achieve.

With the core bumped up we managed to achieve a core clock of 1020MHz and a memory clock of 6200MHz QDR. This is a strong overclock and should yield some strong performance. So let's find out.