HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo & HIS HD7950 IceQ Review

1. Introduction2. HIS HD7950 IceQ3. HIS HD7950 IceQ (Super High Res Gallery)4. HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo5. HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo (Super High Res Gallery)6. Testing Methodology7. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark8. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: 3DMark 1110. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.011. Gaming: F1 2011 (1080p)12. Gaming: Alien V Predator (1080p)13. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 2 (1080p)14. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (1080p)15. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (1200p)16. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (1080p)17. Gaming: Dirt ShowDown (5760x1080)18. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (5760x1080)19. Gaming: Max Payne 3 (5760x1080) DX1120. Technical: Thermal Dynamics21. Technical: Acoustics Performance22. Technical: Power Consumption23. Technical: Overclocking24. Closing Thoughts25. View All Pages

If you are thinking of upgrading your system before Christmas then we have two highly modified graphics cards on test today from HIS which should prove interesting. The HIS HD 7950 IceQ is competitively priced at £239.99 and features a large custom cooler and out of the box overclocked speeds. The high end HIS HD 7970 IceQ X² Turbo is £100 more expensive and features a two fan cooler with highly overclocked core and memory speeds. The big question needs answered today … are they worth a purchase?

We have reviewed many graphics cards from HIS in the last couple of years and have rated their modified, overclocked solutions quite highly. Thankfully they ditched their ugly translucent blue coolers for more appealing designs this year.

Product	HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo	HIS HD7950 IceQ	AMD HD7870	AMD HD7850
Core Clock speed	1050mhz	925mhz	1000mhz	860mhz
Transistors	4.31 billion	4.31 billion	2.8 billion	2.8 billion
Stream Processors	2,048	1,792	1,280	1,024
Compute Performance	3.79 TFLOPS	2.87 TFLOPS	2.56 TFLOPS	1.76 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	112	80	64
Texture Fillrate	134.4 GT/s	103.6 GT/s	80 GT/s	55.0 GT/s
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	33.6 GP/s	25.6 GP/s	32.0 GP/s	27.52 GP/s
Z/Stencil	128	128	128	128
Memory Type	3GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1,500mhz	1,250mhz	1,200mhz	1,200mhz
Memory Data Rate	6.0 GBps	5.0 Gbps	4.8 Gbps	4.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	288 GB/s	240 GB/s	153.6 GB/s	153.6 GB/s

The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo is clocked at 1,050mhz core and the 3GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective). The HIS HD7950 IceQ is clocked at 925mhz and the 3GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,250mhz (5Gbps effective). Both cards have the GDDR5 memory connected via a 384 bit memory interface and have 32 ROPS. The HD7950 has 1,792 shaders and the HD7970 2,048 shaders.

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