The Radeon HD4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo is the fastest single-core card HIS has produced to date, taking AMD/ATI's Radeon HD 4870 GPU, adding a custom cooling solution and overclocking both the core and memory clock speeds, with twice the standard memory to boot.

Just in case you have forgotten, here's a quick recap on the HD4870. The HD4870 (RV770) core is built on a 55nm process with the die measuring 260mm², but still somehow AMD managed to pack it with 956 million transistors, thanks mostly to the 800 stream processors that handle the vertex, pixel and geometry shader data and the 40 texture units. Needless to say it supports both DirectX 10.1 and multi-card CrossfireX set-ups.

The core clock runs at 750MHz while the 512MB of memory runs through a 256-bit memory interface which can support GDDR3, 4 and 5 and it's GDDR5 that gives the HD4870 its punch. The memory clock may only run at 900MHz but because of the way GDDR5 works (the memory frequency is double the data rate) the memory has an effective speed of 3.6GHz instead of just 1.8GHz if GDDR3 or 4 is used. This gives the HD4870 a massive bandwidth of 115GB/s.

Get the latest Dell Coupons and other computer coupons at CheapStingyBargains.com.

The HD4870 also features the second generation of AMD's UVD video decoding engine which supports full HDMI output (DVD and Blu-ray formats) along with full eight-channel audio output and, by using a special DVI-HDMI converter, both video and audio signals are passed out through a single cable.

The HIS Radeon HD4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo has the core engine overclocked by a modest 20MHz at 770MHz, so there is room for a little more tweaking should you feel the need, using the ATI Overdrive facility in the Catalyst Control panel. Instead of the 512MB of GDDR5 memory of the reference design, HIS has installed 1GB on the card and, although the company has used the same Qimonda GDDR5 memory chips as the reference design, it has got them to run 400MHz faster at an effective speed of 4,000MHz.

The dual-slot IceQ 4+ cooler is the latest version of HIS's custom cooling solution, with a larger GPU cover plate (which practically covers the whole PCB) covering both the memory chips and the power modules, and uses 8mm heatpipes instead of the previous version's 6mm. Cooling the card is a blue UV reactive fan which does get a little loud when under load.

It's an attractive looking board, built on a blue PCB with a pair of gold-plated DVI connectors on the gunmetal-coloured blanking plate. Sitting between the two DVI ports is the single S-Video port, while at the other end of the card are two six-pin PCI-E power connectors.

Performance wise the HD4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo certainly gives plenty of bang for the buck. Testing it in 3Dmark06 gave an impressive score of 16,130 marks at a 1,280 x 1,024 pixel resolution, dropping to 11,580 marks at a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution. It also holds up well in the latest, more intensive 3DMark Vantage, scoring 9,609 and 6,100 and 4,165 in Performance, High and Extreme settings respectively.

But more meaningful are the frame rate results in actual games. In the eater of graphics cards, Crysis, it gave an average frame rate score of 40fps at 1,680 x 1,050 with all the in-game details set to high, dropping to 30fps at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x FSAA (Full Screen Anti Aliasing), while in Far Cry 2 it gave 50fps at 1,680 x 1,050 with no filtering added.

The box bundle is a bit measly when compared to other manufacturers' efforts. You just get single DVI-HDMI and DVI-VGA adaptors, a Crossfire bridge, a 4-Pin Molex to 6-pin PCI-E power adaptor and a driver CD.

A great looking card that performs as well as it looks. It is one of the fastest single core HD4870s thanks to the extra memory and slightly overclocked core and memory engines working to good effect. The only downside is the measly software/hardware package, but that does help to keep the cost down.