HIS have been growing from strength to strength over these past few months, especially in Europe. While having already established a strong foothold in Asia and America over the past several years, it's only natural for them to expand its business in to Europe. However, they do face heavy competition from players like Sapphire and some of the mainboard manufacturers, who also make ATI video cards. Other brands like XFX, EVGA, BFG who produce NVIDIA based graphics cards are also hot competitors. So as you can see already it's a very competitive market, but what does HIS got that others don't? Cause in the end it just comes down what added value do you bring that the competition doesn't? - CPU3D

HIS Radeon HD 4870 IceQ4+ 1GB Turbo Card Preview

Being board partners with AMD can sometimes be very fustrating for certain manufacturers. For example, it might mean producing graphics cards with stock components and stock coolers, very boring and the finished product is probably no different to that produced by your competitor. To combat this issue, HIS have introduced a whole new line of products based on extra cooling and better performance, the IceQ4 series. The IceQ4 series from HIS have been making a lot of headlines lately, and this is all thanks to its custom GPU heatpipe coolers, which helps effectively cool the overclocked GPU and memory.

We are taking a look at the HIS Radeon HD 4870 IceQ4+ Turbo which features an overclocked RV770 core running at 770MHz and also 1GB of overclocked GDDR5 memory running at 4000MHz. This is then all cooled by a large custom heatpipe cooler design that takes up two slots. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 is produced using the latest 55nm technology and features 800 stream processors, GDDR5 memory, using 256-bit memory interface, as well as fully HDCP and CrossFire ready. The IceQ4 effectively dissipate the heat from the GPU, thus enabling it for high levels of performance and running cool while remaining silent.

We have to admit, we do like this card. Its performance is extremely good, all thanks an overclocked GPU at 770MHz, but also due to the 1GB of available frame buffer. It's much faster then the standard Radeon HD 4870, and this is proven during our benchmarks. In fact, it's not far off from the dual GPU based Radeon HD 4850 X2, which is also an excellent card albeit the price difference. One of the most attractive selling points of the graphics card is the custom heatpipe cooler. This cooler really helps with reducing the temperature of the graphics card and keeping it much lower than the reference design.

Pricewise, the HIS Radeon HD 4870 IceQ4+ with 1GB of memory currently costs around $300, which we think is correctly priced and much better than we thought. It's way cheaper than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280 cards. We have to congratulate HIS for producing such a fine graphics card. It's one of the fastest single GPU based Radeon HD 4800 series graphics cards that we've tested to date. It may not be as fancy as a dual GPU or the latest GeForce GTX 295, but at its current price, it offers good value for money with excellent performance. It's definitely worth considering if you're a mainstream to high-end gamer.