October last year, AMD released its second generation Radeon HD 6800 cards using DirectX 11 architecture, with codename Northern Islands. The time spent between the Radeon HD 5000 and following series was used to refine and fine tune its architecture to better suit their existing 40nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per die-area which plays an important role in product pricing, compared to the previous generation Evergreen architecture. With the HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo, the company is introducing a new heatsink design. This IceQ X cooler uses blue transparent plastic to convey an image of frozen iceblock. - techPowerUp

HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X 1GB Turbo Board Review

The cooler uses a light blue transparent plastic shroud which does not feel flimsy at all. The graphics card requires two slots in your system which is rather usual these days. You may combine up to two Radeon HD 6800 boards of any model from any vendor in CrossFire. Their HIS IceQ X cooler uses four heatpipes and a large copper baseplate to keep the card cool but requires only a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector. It comes with GDDR5 memory chips which are made by Hynix and rated for 5000MHz effective clock speed. The Turbo in the name stands for higher clocks, which are well increased compared to reference design.

The HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo is a rock solid no-frills Radeon HD 6850 card. It comes with higher clocks out the box, which are in the middle of typical Radeon HD 6850 out of the box overclocks. This can help the board gain a nice six percent performance advantage, averaged over the games we ran. The new IceQ X heatsink design from HIS seems to do its job well and reaches very low temperatures. Unfortunately these temperatures come at the price of fan noise which seems to be higher than necessary in idle. Under load the graphics card is a bit quieter than the AMD reference design, but not by much.

Given the low temperatures we see some good potential for manually quietening down the fan via software or BIOS tweaking, to have a low noise solution. While overclocking on our card worked well, the clock speeds we saw were just in the typical range for a Radeon HD 6850 card. Most Radeon HD 6850 cards are great clockers and you can easily add another extra ten percent gaming performance with some overclocking. And if you are willing to go even further, the CHiL voltage regulator used offers full voltage control, we tested up to 1.45V, which yielded us a clock frequency above 1020MHz and temperatures were still in the low 80°C's.

Overall the HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo edition is a good alternative to any Radeon HD 6850 reference video cards, but it fails to have any unique properties that really make it stand out of the crowd. If the price is right, we would just buy.