HIS HD 6870 IceQ X

HIS 6870 IceQ X Turbo X Review

With the same high-performing cooler, the HIS 6870 IceQ X Turbo X should be remarkably similar to the HIS 6950 IceQ X Turbo X reviewed previously. The mid-range 6870 should run cool and quiet while sporting hefty overclocks like the high-end cards. Lets see if that holds true as we torture the HIS 6870 with some intense overclocking and benchmarks.

Product Specifications and Features

The 6870 has been released for quite some time now, so it is not necessary to explain the the technical details and features. You can see that HIS 6870 IceQ X Turbo X sports very aggressive factory overclocks on  coming in at a blazing 975Mhz core with the memory at 1150Mhz out of the box. That is impressive from the reference clocks of 900Mhz/1050Mhz.

Technical Features

The 6870 comes with similar features as its bigger brothers do. Below is a list from the HIS website of the major features of this card.

Cooling

In order to fulfill its promises of a -15° C cooler temperatures and 15db quieter operation, HIS has placed the latest IceQ cooler on the 6870. The heatsink has a nice ice blue cover helping route the airflow and give it that ‘IceQ’ look. The newest version of this cooler uses four aluminum heat pipes along with aluminum fins and a 92mm fan blowing down on to the heatsink. Air flow then exhausts partially out the back of a case, through the top and rear. Below you can see a picture of the cooling system broken down in to its parts showing how it works:

With this cooler and the automatic fan profile, the card never broke 60° C with a 23° C ambient. The fan ramped up to around the 65% mark, so it fairly quiet throughout the benchmarking and gaming sessions. Definitely audible, but quiet. When I cranked up the fan to 100% and tested that way, the card never broke 55° C even when overclocked with added voltage. Pretty impressive feat.

Overall this is one of the quietest and most effective coolers on a GPU I have seen in a while, especially when compared to the reference coolers. The auto profile in Afterburner kept the card cool and quiet throughout its active life with me which was nice to finally not have to adjust it manually.  HIS has a great cooler for the IceQ series of cards… effective, and quiet.

As you can see we achieved some decent results when overclocking this card to the max. It wasn’t as big of an increase as the other cards in this series, however this card started out at 975Mhz in the first place. I was able to achieve 1021Mhz core and 1200Mhz memory to pass most tests with the voltage set on the Afterburner maximum of 1.3v. On Vantage I had to drop the core back to 1000Mhz.  I kept the fan cranked at 100% for these tests and the card peaked around 55° C. Not much of a difference vs stock speeds! I was a bit disappointed in the lack of headroom for overclocking, but after researching a bit hwbot.org, it seems as though the clocks I achieved are about normal and my expectations were just out of line. It just goes to show how aggressive the factory overclocks are on this card.