The Card

HIS' HD4850 card is a dual slot graphics solution as you can see below.  The reference card is a single slot unit but then again it's a single slot unit that runs quite hot.  Loosing a second expansion slot really is a painless thing with most folks rarely filling all their open mainboard expansion slots in the first place.  The card measures a trim 9 5/16" (237mm) long and is quite light with its 520 grams of weight.  The dark aqua blue of the PCB makes a nice color scheme with the bronze colored aluminum cooling fins and blue graphics of the cooler.

  

The IceQ4 Cooler is has an overall design we've seen pieces of elsewhere.  On one end of the card resides a 75mm turbine type fan.  This fan draws the bulk of its air in from the top side as you already guessed.  What you may not have known is that on the underside of the acrylic casing are small vents that allow some air to also be drawn up off the PCB below.  If you look closely on the picture below you can see them.  This design prevents any "dead zones" where stagnant warm air sits uncirculated, heating up parts of the card needlessly.  HIS refers to this as Bi-Directional Air Intake Channeling.  Once the air is pulled in, it is then blown through a series of thin aluminum convection fins radiating up off a copper base.

  

These convection fins stretch from just behind the intake fan to an exhaust area at the rear of the card.  Below you can see two heatpipes coming up from an oversized base that radiates heat off of the GPU to make the cooler more efficient.  Let me point out for you that the GPU and the memory heatsinks are separate units.  Isolating the two keeps one from radiating heat to the other.

The extra power the HIS HD4850 IceQ4 TurboX needs is fed in from a rear mounted 6-pin PCI-E port.  HIS recommends a minimum 450 watt power supply be used with the HIS HD4850 IceQ4 TurboX; 550 watts if you plan on doubling your pleasure with Crossfire.

Speaking of Crossfire, here's a quick shot to the two interconnect posts.  Included with every Crossfire ready card is a single interconnect bridge cable.  So if you have two cards, you have two cables.

The rear bracket area has a dark gray/black anodize color.  Normally, I could care less about the coloring, if any, of a rear bracket but in this case the two gold plated DVI outputs really set it off.  Situated between the two is a S-Video out port.

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