HIS 7950 IceQ X2 Boost Clock Pro Reviews

In such a competitive GPU market, uniqueness usually garners a great amount of interest but it rarely sells graphics cards. The reason behind this is quite simple: gamers may love looking at the newest Matrix, Classified, Lightning or Super Overclock card but they can rarely afford such an expensive upgrade. So while there may be very little to differentiate the HIS HD 7970 IceQ X² and HD 7970 IceQ X² from their immediate competition due to a true lack of game changing features, there’s still plenty to like. Without taking any risks or building additional cost into their IceQ X², HIS was still able to release a pair of highly appealing products. They accomplished this by combining a top notch heatsink and great overclocking abilities with decent software by way of the new iTurbo application. The result is a pair of cards which overclock extremely well without a substantial increase in fan noise or heat. While we actually achieved some reasonably high clock speeds sans voltage changes, HIS’ iTurbo application was more than willing to take things to the next level. With slight modifications to the core and memory voltages, the HD 7970 IceQ X² and HD 7970 IceQ X² were really able to fly.

The HIS HD 7950 X² IceQ Boost uses the AMD reference PCB, although it's colored blue and comes with a large dual-fan cooler. Thanks to AMD's Boost technology and a generous overclock out of the box, we see the card cruise past the HD 7950 by, on average, 11%, which puts the card neck to neck with the NVIDIA GTX 670. I wish HIS had overclocked the memory a bit beyond the default of 1250 MHz for an easy performance boost. Overclocking worked fantastically with our sample. GPU clock went up by 27% and reached 1210 MHz, which is typically only seen on HD 7970 GHz Edition cards. Memory overclocked well too, but not as much as on other cards with Samsung/Hynix memory. In the end, overclocking yielded over 20% extra performance, putting the card even beyond the HD 7970 GHz Edition.