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HIS has been known to produce affordable mainstream graphic cards for the Asia market. They are one of many board partners for AMD/ATI, producing Radeon cards for the masses. Having enjoyed plenty of success with its large market share in Asia (Hong Kong, China and Taiwan), they now look to expand theor business into other countries. But in order to do this ... you need to spend a bit money to market your product, especially your brand name. Unfortunately, the graphics card market in Europe is already very saturated, and what's more ... little is known about them in Europe, especially in the UK. Where as some of the bigger brands can splash their cash in marketing, HIS have been more cautious with their money. They believe a product will sell if it is good enough in the first place. Well ... we shall see if this theory is correct. Here's a little blurb taken from their website ... 

"HIS - Hightech Information System Limited is an internationally acclaimed graphics cards company. HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality graphic cards in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business to the best of our abilities. Headquartered in Hong Kong, and with sales offices and distribution networks in Europe, Middle East, North America and Asia Pacific Regions; our worldwide customers benefits from efficient and localized services."

Last month, we've reviewed a Radeon graphics card from HIS ... it was the HD 4830. We found it to be a very good graphics card that offered decent performance and great value. It competed very well against similar cards in its class, noteably the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830. What strikes me about HIS Radeon graphic cards is the fact that they use their own custom cooler. We all know that GPU core temperatures can rise significantly during its operation. This is definitely the case with the ATI Radeon HD 4850, so having a custom cooler that can effectively reduce the GPU temperature is definitely an advantage over its competitors, who might still be using a standard stock cooler.

In this review, we will be taking a look at the HIS ICEQ4 Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. It utilises an overclocked ATI Radeon HD 4850 GPU (RV770) @ 685Mhz, with 512Mb of DDR3 ram at 2.2Ghz. The whole card is cooled by their own custom heatpipe cooler called ICEQ4. It's their 4th generation in custom GPU coolers, and in this particular model ... takes up 2 PCIe slot space. Needless to say the ATI Radeon HD 4850 offers a wealth of exciting technologies which you probably already know. These include a 55nm GPU, 800 stream processors, supports DX10.1, Crossfire X, as well as 24x custom filter anti-aliasing techniques.

We're expecting the HIS ICEQ4 Radeon HD 4850 to perform just as well as any other Radeon HD 4850 on the market, if not better. We've got high expectations in terms of performance because of the pre-overclocked GPU @ 685Mhz (default is 625Mhz). So let's hope HIS can deliver the goods. What's even more interesting, is the overall operating temperature of the graphics card. We all know that standard Radeon HD 4850 can run really HOT, but with such a powerful custom heatpipe cooler on the HIS ICEQ4 Radeon HD 4850, we should be able to see lower GPU temperatures. 

In our tests we'll be using several GPU intensive DX10 games ... with both 4xAA and 16xAF options enabled, as well as your usual 3D Mark 2005, 2006 and Vantage tests. Our test rig includes an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ default 2.4Ghz, Gigabyte GA-X48 DQ6 (X48) motherboard, Kingston HyperX DDR2 PC2-9200 2Gb Kit, PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W PSU and a 24" Samsung SyncMaster 245B LCD monitor. All-in-all, it's a decently spec'd system for DX10 gaming.

OK, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the HIS ICEQ4 Radeon HD 4850 (512Mb DDR3) ...