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HIS HD 4870 IceQ4+ Turbo 1 GB GDDR5 |
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Value and Conclusion
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| 8.2 | The HIS HD 4870 IceQ4+ Turbo is a solid choice for everybody looking for something that goes beyond HD 4870 reference design. The addition of 512 MB GDDR5 for a total of one gig certainly helps in recent games at higher resolutions. Even though it is fairly small, the overclock out of the box is also a nice addition. Should you need more performance you can easily overclock the card well beyond 800 MHz - our sample managed 835 MHz which is quite close to the clocks of the HD 4890 reference (850 MHz). There is only one major issue that I can complain about with this card and that is the fan noise. Due to what seems a bug in the fan control implementation in the BIOS, the card will be extremely noisy under load. Until HIS issues a BIOS fix you should use manual fan control to have a quiet gaming experience. I ran a few quick tests with a custom fan profile and could get the card to run at noise levels that I consider very quiet - even under full load. With a price of arund $260 the card is not cheap, especially not when considering all the recent AMD price drops on the HD 4870. The cheapest 512 MB HD 4870 costs around $170 nowadays, making it a tough choice to spend extra money on more expensive cards. |
 Recommended award given under the assumption that the fan bug will be fixed by a BIOS update. |
HIS notified me that a fixed BIOS is already available here. You can use ATIFlash or WinFlash to flash it to your card. Please note that this BIOS is only for cards with the part number 113-SBSJ2G09-00R-00.
Cards available from retailers already have the fixed BIOS.
