HIS Radeon HD 7870 IceQ 2GB Video Cards in CrossFire Overclocked Review

HIS iTurbo

This is the first time we've used HIS iTurbo software and when you open it up for the first time you are greeted with this small iTurbo logo that we see on the boxes and video cards of recent HIS models. The first thing we do is hit the iTurbo button, it doesn't really tell us much, but we see it light up when it's pressed.

If we fire up GPU-Z, though, we can see that our video card has been automatically overclocked from the default 1000MHz / 4800MHz QDR setup to 1111MHz and 4848MHz QDR. While there's not much going on when it comes to the memory, this is a nice automatic overclock when it comes to the core.

Moving into the advanced area we've got a whole bunch of options when it comes overclocking with the first screen being "Home" which gives us a little bit of a run down and some latest news.

The next tab is "Info" and it gives us a run down on the video card we're dealing with. You've got the main specifications, clock speeds and driver version. In our case where we've got two cards, you can go to the top and switch which card you want to highlight.

Moving to the "Overclock" tab this is the one you'll probably spend most your time in. The options are fairly standard - you can see we've got GPU and Memory clock and across the bottom we've got the voltage change option. You can see we've got the option for four profiles along with an option to set the iTurbo profile.

Finally we finish up with the "FanControl" tab which gives us the ability to set the fan speed to manual options and then save them to a profile be it "Quieter" or "Cooler" which can then be selected in the very first screen. We've also got the standard settings area which is fairly self-explanatory with the image above giving us a good run down on what exactly we're dealing with.

Specifications

Being the non-Turbo model means that the card comes with the reference clock speeds. That means the core comes in at 1000MHz while the 2GB of GDDR5 carries a clock of 4800MHz QDR. Of course we want to look at overclocking today and that's exactly what we're doing.

Something HIS has really been promoting with the latest line of IceQ coolers is that they're excellent in CrossFire. A lot of aftermarket coolers don't sit well when moving to CrossFire or SLI because of the fan design. When we tested the HD 7870 IceQ Turbo we ended up with a setup of 1275MHz / 5600MHz QDR.

Looking above you can see we ended up both video cards running at a very strong 1250MHz while the memory clock came in slightly higher at 5700MHz QDR. This is a massive 25% overclock and when combined across both video cards, it should bring with it some excellent performance.