Installation/Operation

Installing our HIS HD4850 IceQ4 TurboX went without any issues at all.  No space limitations were found or any other physical issues.  HIS' HD4850 IceQ4 TurboX fired up right out of the box and we were up and running with Catalyst 8.8 drivers we downloaded off of the ATi website within a couple of minutes.

Temperature

After firing up our test bed and giving the system 15 minutes or so to get to a stable and accurate idle temperature we had a look at some temps.  The Catalyst Control Panel sensor gave us an idle GPU temperature reading of 49 degrees Celsius.  Our putting the GPU under load with Crysis for half an hour, we were only able to achieve a reading of 59 degrees Celsius.  The HIS IceQ4 cooler does a great and I can only hope they strap one onto their HD4870x2 card.  Our load temperatures with the HIS HD4850 IceQ4 TurboX were 20 degrees cooler than the idle temperatures measured from a reference design HD4850 card.  With a factory overclock, this extra cooling will come in useful.

Sound Level

The 75mm cooling fan of the IceQ4 cooler never spun up to an audible level.  Even after fragging away when we turned all the case fans of our Zalman GT1000 Case off, the card never spun up to an audible point.

Performance

Our test bed is based around an ASUS Maximus Formula X38 based mainboard.  The OS is Windows Vista Home Premium installed on a Western Digital SATA II HDD.  Our comparison cards today are going to be a reference design Radeon HD4850 as well as a reference design Radeon HD4870 card.

Testing will be done with real world game play using frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program.  Results are graphed in three minute segments from three game titles, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and Assassin's Creed.  Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record game play from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products.  Screen resolution and other settings will be listed out before each performance graph.  We will also be throwing in Futuremark's 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage in the benchmark rodeo as well.  ATi's Catalyst 8.8 drivers were used for all cards in all tests.

BACK                    NEXT

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