Introduction

AMD HD 4850 Series has been one the market for a while now. The first cards all had to follow AMD's reference design specifications. But now that this limitation is lifted, most add-in-board manufacturers are coming up with their own designs to reduce cost, add performance or improve cooling.

Packaging & Contents

The HIS package is dominated by icy blue. On the front you find the important product highlights like TurboX overclocked, 512 MB and HDMI. The back goes into more detail about the IceQ4 technology.



You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Manual + Driver CD
• CrossFire bridge
• DVI adapter, HDMI adapter
• TV out adapter
• PCI-E power adapter
• HIS sticker + HIS screwdriver / leveling tool

The Card

The big IceQ4 cooler covers almost the whole card. Due to the large cooler the card occupies two slots in your system which won't be a problem unless you are using a tiny media PC case.


The card has two DVI ports, basically the most common output configuration these days. In case you need an analog VGA port you can use the included DVI adapter. When using an HDMI adapter (also included), you will also have access to HDMI+HDCP+Audio, which allows easy setup of a media PC. All recent ATI Radeon cards have a Realtek HD Audio device integrated inside the GPU silicon. This means that you don't have to connect any additional cabling to the graphics card for HDMI Audio. A new feature of the HD 4xxx Series is support for 7.1 HDMI audio, the older HD 3xxx cards supported only 5.1.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

Even though the heatsink base looks like copper, it is just aluminum with some color on top.


This piece of metal cools the eight memory chips it is attached securely by screws going through from the back side of the card.



The reference design HD 4850 cards all used a three phase power design which tended to get quite hot. HIS went with the four-phase route which distributes the load over more components.


Like all other HD 4850 versions, the HIS HD 4850 IceQ4 requires one six pin PCI-Express power connector.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4J52324QH-HJ08. With 0.8 ns latency they should be good for at least 1250 MHz.


We already know the RV770 graphics processor from the HD 4850, HD 4870 and HD 4870 X2. It is made at TSMC Taiwan in a 55 nm process and has 956 million transistors.