HIS 6970 IceQ Pro Reviews

Thus variant of Radeon HD6970 that HIS has created uses a customised IceQ cooler, with four copper heat pipes protruding from the side of the card, and the company claims its card runs 23 degrees cooler than a standard Radeon HD6970. It’s also factory overclocked, with the memory running at 1400MHz (5.6GHz effective) and its core clock running at 900MHz. As the card has also had a few tweaks to its electronics, it should be possible to overclock it further. In games, the HIS Radeon HD6970 IceQ managed some impressive performance. It achieved 114fps in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 1280 x 1024 and 88fps at 1920 x 1080. In Stalker, it came out slightly ahead of its similarly priced rival, the GeForce GTX 570 at 1920 x 1080, and was significantly faster in Crysis at 1280 x 1024.

So now that performance against their immediate competition has been not so firmly established, let’s break these two cards apart and discuss their viability in the current market. The HIS HD 6970 IceQ promises lower temperatures and a quieter computing experience than the reference card and for the most part it achieves these goals. We weren’t expecting all that much from its oddball heatsink design and yet it succeeded in knocking a good 11 degrees off the temperature of the stock HD 6970. Unfortunately, this is a far cry from HIS’ claimed 23 degree improvement and the IceQ fan is anything but silent.