HIS HD 3870 IceQ3 Turbo 512 MB

A Closer Look

At first sight the cooler looks pretty cool, it has copper and heatpipes and hot air is going outside of the case. When I cleaned up the baseplate though I noticed that the part that makes contact with the GPU core is made from aluminum? After scraping around a bit on the cooler I found out that the whole metal piece is made from aluminum and just painted in copper color. Even though it is just aluminum, the cooler does a fine job at keeping the card cool.


The memory cooler is also a painted piece of aluminum with a number of fins on it. As we can see later in the overclocking section of the review it does a fine job at keeping the memory cool.


CrossFire is supported of course, even the new CrossFireX which will work with up to four GPUs using Catalyst 8.3 and up.


Near the back of the card you find a single six pin PCI-Express power connector. It is required for operation at all times, even when the card is running in PCI-E 2.0 mode which has a higher power delivery capability over the bus.


The GDDR4 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4U52324QE-BC08. With 0.8 ns latency (= 1200 MHz) they should have some headroom left for overclocking.


The GPU is the ATI RV670 which is made in a 55nm process at TSMC.
Please note the rubber spacers around the core which are there to prevent any cracking of the core from the IceQ3 cooler.