For the past month or so I've been saying that it was only a matter of time before HIS coupled the very successful HD4800 cards with their equally successful IceQ cooler.  Both the Radeon HD4850 and the HD4870 run hot with the reference design cooler.  HIS did as we expected and addressed this by strapping on their latest generation GPU/Memory cooler on board, the IceQ4. 

Now the cooler is only half the story.  Not only did HIS release an IceQ4 equipped HD4850 VGA card but they did so with a factory overclock.  The "TurboX" designation on the HIS card boils down to this HD4850 leaving its stock GPU and memory speeds of 625MHz and 2.0GHz behind in favor of 685MHz on the core and the memory cranking at 2.2GHz.  HIS have seen fit to send over a sample of their building on this highly successful Radeon HD4850 card for a first hand look.  Let's start off with the white papers.

Specifications

• Graphics Engine: ATi Radeon HD4850

• Interface: PCI-Express 2.0

• Engine Clock: 685MHz

• Memory Clock: 2.2GHz

• Memory Type/Size: GDDR3/512MB

• Memory Interface: 256-bit

• Stream Processing Units: 800

• Max Resolution: 2560x1600

• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering

• VGA Output: Yes with adapter

• Built in HDMI and 7.1 surround audio

• Full HD 1080p

• ATi AVIVO HD video and display technology

• Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for Blue-Ray and HD Video

• DVI: two ports

• Native CrossfireX support

• DirectX 10.1 Support

What you get

Opening up the box, we find with the HIS Radeon HD4850 IceQ4 TurboX card, a driver CD, a DVI to HDMI adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, HD Component Out, Installation guide, PCI-E power adapter cable, CrossfireX bridge, HIS' hip little pocket screwdriver with level and LED light along with an HIS case badge.  We didn't find extra demo disks or other software inside but I'm glad of that.  This keeps costs down and my trashcan from becoming full.

NEXT

Pg. 1 - Introduction
Pg. 2 - The Card
Pg. 3 - Test Bed/Benchmarks
Pg. 4 - Benchmarks
Pg. 5 - Image Quality/Overclocking/Conclusion