HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo

Overclocking

We overclocked the HIS Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo graphics card using RivaTuner v2.22 to increase the clock speeds and Crysis to check that the card was stable at the higher speeds.

We increased the frequencies by 5MHz at a time, testing for visual corruption and throttling with Crysis under DirectX 10 at each incremental boost.

As a quick reminder, the 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo comes clocked at 770MHz core and 4,000MHz (effective) on the memory.

After a bit of time tweaking and stress testing, we settled on a final overclock of 796MHz on the core - frankly, we were hoping for higher, as it only equates to a six percent increase over the stock Radeon HD 4870 1GB's core speed. Memory overclocking fared a little better and we managed to increase the memory from an already overclocked 4,000MHz to an impressive 4,230MHz (effective) - this works out at a 17.5 percent improvement over the stock memory clocks.

In terms of performance, we added an extra frame per second at 1,280 x 1,024 0xAA 16xAF in Crysis with all of the in game settings tuned up to very high. The minimum frame rate also received a boost - it went up from 15 fps to 18 fps, which should help to make the gaming experience a bit smoother at these settings.

Final Thoughts...

We had high hopes for the HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo, but sadly they haven’t been fulfilled. Typically, HIS goes out of its way to spice up AMD’s ATI Radeon graphics cards with an improved cooling solution, higher clock speeds and a few innovations added in for good measure. While we’ve got some of that here, the one thing we haven’t got is a new cooling solution – instead, it’s a refinement of the reference cooler.

What makes it worse is the fact that the refinements made appear to be for the worse – at least, where noise is concerned. HIS has essentially redesigned the fan shroud to expose the heatpipes to the elements and introduced a slightly different fan with fewer blades. In order to improve cooling performance, the fan speed has been raised and to such an extent that it's quite noisy (but not offensively so) when the card is idling – that’s not something we really appreciate.

Disappointingly, the core clock speed hasn’t been increased by anything more than a token amount and the result is that the real-world performance benefits are generally fairly limited. The memory clocks are impressive – there’s no doubt about that – but we would have hoped the core speed overclock would have at least come close to matching that.

Given that the quoted retail pricing for the HIS Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo is around £229 including VAT, it’s quite a bit more expensive than a standard Radeon HD 4870 1GB with essentially the same cooler and slightly lower clock speeds. You can pick up a standard HIS Radeon HD 4870 1GB for under £200 these days. What’s more, our current choice at this price point – the GeForce GTX 260-216 – is available for just over £200 as well and in a lot of titles, it will deliver higher performance than the HIS Radeon HD 4870 1GB. Of course, there are titles where the 4870 1GB is stronger, but for the most part we think that the GTX 260-216 is the better option right now.

Overall then, the HIS Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo offers very few benefits over a standard Radeon HD 4870 1GB and, if you’ve got your heart set on a Radeon, we’d recommend a standard-clocked 4870 1GB at this price point – you’ll get more bang for your buck.

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