HIS Radeon HD 7870 IceQ GHz Edition

HIS HD 7870 IceQ GHz Edition review

This latest version of the IceQ cards from HIS gave me a big, shit-eating grin when I pulled it from the chunky packaging. The massive cooler strapped onto the PCB makes it look like a graphics card from 2005, when bigger was unashamedly better. The cooling array spreads out from the circuit board to house a large fan that's lifted away from the rest of the componentry. If space is at a premium in your build, this may not be the card for you. The 'Black Hole' impeller HIS uses on its IceQ card is a little smarter than you might give it credit for, though. The fact that it is raised away from the PCB means it can draw in air from both sides. Therefore, if you have another PCI/PCIe card pushing up against it, the IceQ will still draw in a decent air supply. It's not all about the chunky impeller though - there are also four big aluminium heatpipes going from the copper plate into the heatsink cooled by the Black Hole. Stock options Why does it need this extra-special cooling array with the cosmological nomenclature? Well, despite the GHz Edition naming, this is an overclocked version of the stock card. So GHz Edition +1, then? Actually it's more like +100MHz, as the starting clock speed for the HD 7870 IceQ is 1,100MHz. Does that make it GHz Ed +0.1?