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HIS (Hightech Informations System) have been growing from strength to strength over the past few months, especially in Europe. 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. 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."

However, they do face heavy competition ... from players like Sapphire and some of the motherboard manufacturers, who also make Radeon graphics cards. Other brands like XFX, EGVA, BFG who produce Nvidia Geforce based graphic cards are also hot competitors. So, as you can see already ... it's a very, very competitive market, but what have HIS got, that others don't? We've reviewed several HIS graphic cards in the past, and we've found them to offer decent performance, good quality and a fair price. But is it really enough to compete against others on the market?

Being board partners with AMD/ATI can sometimes be very fustrating for certain manufacturers. For example, it might mean producing graphic cards with stock components and stock coolers ... very boring and the finished product is probably no different to that, produced by your competitor (who may also be another board partner with AMD/ATI). 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. The ICEQ4 series can be found on all of HIS's Radeon HD48xx cards including the one we're about to review.

In this review, we'll be taking a look at the HIS Radeon HD 4870 ICEQ 4+ Turbo. It features an overclocked RV770 GPU @ 770Mhz and also 1Gb of overclocked GDDR5 memory @ 2Ghz (2x1000Mhz). This is then all cooled by a large custom heatpipe GPU cooler that takes up two PCI slot space. Here's a quick recap on the ATI Radeon HD 4870 GPU (RV770). It's produced using the latest 55nm technology and features 800 processor streams, GDDR5 memory, using 256-bit memory interface, as well as fully HDCP and Crossfire ready.

In our tests we'll be testing the HIS Radeon HD 4870 ICEQ 4+ Turbo with 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 motherboard, Kingston HyperX PC2-9200 DDR2 2Gb Kit, PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W PSU and a Samsung 24" widescreen TFT LCD monitor. All-in-all, it's a decently spec'd system for DX10 gaming.

OK, lets not waste any more time and see how well the HIS Radeon HD 4870 ICEQ 4+ Turbo will perform against other Radeon HD48xx based cards on the market.