HIS HD6850 ICE Q X Review – the ultimate HD6850 ?

The HIS HD6850 ICE Q X is quite possibly the best HD6850 on the market. The appearance is sure to divide opinion, after all you can't release a semi transparent aqua coloured graphics card and expect everyone to accept it without question. We actually think it looks rather striking and while our first impression was negative, we grew to like the appearance.

The cooler is without question, stellar. It isn't as quiet as the Sapphire Toxic Edition but HIS have opted for a slightly higher fan speed balance to reduce load temperatures. With a maximum spin of around 47% in the bios, its a good tradeoff to maintain respectable dBa while ensuring the core is adequately cooled, even when overclocked.

Even though this PCB design only requires a single 6 pin power connector, the overclocking headroom is massive with this particular board reaching 1025mhz on the core and over 1200mhz (4800 effective) from the memory. We can't guarantee they will all hit these speeds, but 950mhz+ should be achievable by the majority of boards on sale.

Idle power consumption also impressed us, with the PCB design only demanding 16 watts, the lowest we have yet to record from this specific board design.

Pricing has yet to be confirmed, but we would expect this product to hit retail around £160-175 in the UK, which makes it easily a top rated graphics solution and perfectly capable of high image quality 1080p gaming.

KitGuru says: If you can live with the colour scheme then this is one of the best HD6850's on the market.

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