HIS Radeon HD 6950 IceQ Edition Review

Our sample wasn't shipped in a full retail box, but we published a picture of the retail box on the previous page. The bundle includes literature on the card, Dirt 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, power and video converter cables and a black device which HIS call the ‘Weight Lifter'.

The Weight Lifter is supplied with a ‘user guide' which explains how to expand and contract the device. It basically helps to support the card within a chassis, taking all the weight from the PCIe slot. It seems a rather frivilous addition and rather pointless (with a HD6950 anyway), but it might interest some people. It is free, so we aren't complaining.

The bundle also includes a rather amusing little sheet, explaining how to insert a graphics card into the system. Aim for the slot and insert !

The HIS ATI Radeon HD 6950 IceQ X PLUS certainly catches the eye, but perhaps for the wrong reason. We really aren't sure what to make of the appearance of the semi transparent cooler, but in the past it has worked exceptionally well. The card is built around a blue custom PCB design and the cooler overhangs the edge on the outer most side.

Four very thick heatpipes extrude from the top side of the card, casting gold reflections on the shiny surface of the cooler. It is fully Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations.

The card requires two 6 pin PCIe cables to operate correctly.

The board has two DVI cables, one full sized HDMI port and two mini displayport connectors. It is Eyefinity capable.

The cooler is easily removed and we can see the underside, which is based around a copper base leading out to four heatpipes and into two rack of aluminum fins.

Surprisingly, the card is supplied at reference clocks of 800mhz core and 1250 mhz (5000 effective) from the 2GB of GDDR5 memory. This is connected via a 256 memory interface. The card has 1408 unified shaders and 32 ROPs. We would have expected even a slight overclock with such a high end cooling system onboard however.

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