HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo & HIS HD7950 IceQ Review

If you are thinking of upgrading your system before Christmas then we have two highly modified graphics cards on test today from HIS which should prove interesting. The HIS HD 7950 IceQ is competitively priced at £239.99 and features a large custom cooler and out of the box overclocked speeds. The high end HIS HD 7970 IceQ X² Turbo is £100 more expensive and features a two fan cooler with highly overclocked core and memory speeds. The big question needs answered today ... are they worth a purchase? We have reviewed many graphics cards from HIS in the last couple of years and have rated their modified, overclocked solutions quite highly. Thankfully they ditched their ugly translucent blue coolers for more appealing designs this year. Product HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo HIS HD7950 IceQ AMD HD7870 AMD HD7850 Core Clock speed 1050mhz 925mhz 1000mhz 860mhz Transistors 4.31 billion 4.31 billion 2.8 billion 2.8 billion Stream Processors 2,048 1,792 1,280 1,024 Compute Performance 3.79 TFLOPS 2.87 TFLOPS 2.56 TFLOPS 1.76 TFLOPS Texture Units 128 112 80 64 Texture Fillrate 134.4 GT/s 103.6 GT/s 80 GT/s 55.0 GT/s ROPs 32 32 32 32 Pixel Fillrate 33.6 GP/s 25.6 GP/s 32.0 GP/s 27.52 GP/s Z/Stencil 128 128 128 128 Memory Type 3GB GDDR5 3GB GDDR5 2GB GDDR5 2GB GDDR5 Memory Clock 1,500mhz 1,250mhz 1,200mhz 1,200mhz Memory Data Rate 6.0 GBps 5.0 Gbps 4.8 Gbps 4.8 Gbps Memory Bandwidth 288 GB/s 240 GB/s 153.6 GB/s 153.6 GB/s The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo is clocked at 1,050mhz core and the 3GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective). The HIS HD7950 IceQ is clocked at 925mhz and the 3GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,250mhz (5Gbps effective). Both cards have the GDDR5 memory connected via a 384 bit memory interface and have 32 ROPS. The HD7950 has 1,792 shaders and the HD7970 2,048 shaders. The HIS HD7950 IceQ ships in a tall box with rather nondescript artwork on the cover. The bundle includes a Crossfire cable, an installation diagram, video converter and software disc. Always best getting the latest drivers for these cards from AMD's website however. The HIS HD7950 IceQ cooler is primarily black, with a dark blue fan set at the extreme right side. It is built around a blue PCB. The HIS HD7950 IceQ is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations. The card takes power from two 6 pin PCI connectors. There is a DVI port, a full size HDMI port, and two mini DisplayPorts on the rear I/O panel, as shown above. The design of this cooler ensures that hot air is blown out the rear of the computer case. Always a bonus. The cooler is very easy to remove, being held in place with only 4 screws. It is based around a copper base with aluminum fins and four thick heatpipes. Each of the memory chips are directly cooled via the base. Thermal pads are installed on each position. The PCB has additional VRM heatsinks to enhance cooling potential. HIS are using ELPIDA memory on this card. An overview of the HIS HD7950 IceQ in GPUz. The card has 32 ROP's, 1792 unified shaders and is built on the 28 nm manufacturing process. The 3GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a wide 384 bit memory interface. The core is clocked at 925mhz and the memory at 1,250mhz (5GBps effective). On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo ships in a long box identical to other cards in this family. The bundle includes a Crossfire cable, video converters and software disc. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo looks identical to the more expensive 'X' GHZ Edition which we reviewed back in August. The cooler overhangs the PCB on the right side and is formed around two large fans which cover the full width of the PCB. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations. The card takes power from two 8 pin connectors. In theory this card could demand up to 375W of power. This card has a DVI connector, full sized HDMI port and two mini DisplayPorts. The cooler on the HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo is more substantial than the cheaper model. There are five thick heatpipes which run into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the copper base. The card itself is covered in a heatsink to cooler the memory and VRM's on the PCB. An overview of the HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo in GPUz. The card is built on the 28 nm manufacturing process. The 3GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a wide 384 bit memory interface. The core is clocked at 1050mhz and the memory at 1,500mhz (6GBps effective). The card has dual geometry engines, eight render back ends, 2048 unified shaders, 32 color ROPs per clock and 128 Z/stencil ROPs per clock. On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. To test today we are using our long standing Core i7 970 system, which is overclocked. We have a variety of hardware benchmarked on this system this year which will make for an interesting market comparison. Main Test System: Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz Graphics: HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo & HIS HD7950 IceQ Cooling: Coolit Vantage Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65 Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT Power Supply: Corsair AX1200 Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32 Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot) Monitor: Dell U3011. We also change the system later in the review to test Eyefinity across three 24 inch screens. Ultra High End System (For 3 screen testing): Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.6ghz Cooler: Antec 920 H20 Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30 Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Power Supply: Enermax Platimax 1200W Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung Monitors: Dell U2410 x 3. Comparison Cards: KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC Asus GTX680 Asus GTX670 Direct CU II TOP Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition (1200mhz core) HD7970 MSI R7950 Twin Frozr III 3GD5/OC HD7950 Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition HD7870 HD7850 HD6990 (880 core) HD6970 HD6950 HD6870 Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition XFX HD7770 Black Edition S CFx HD7770 CFx HD7770 Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate Edition HD6790 GTX590 SLi GTX590 GTX580 SLi GTX580 GTX570 Software: Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit Unigine Heaven Benchmark 3DMark Vantage 3DMark 11 Fraps Professional Steam Client FurMark Games: Alien V Predator Tom Clancy HAWX 2 Resident Evil 5 Far Cry 2 F1 2011 Total War: Shogun 2 Battlefield 3 Dirt Showdown Max Payne 3 All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page. Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia. Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable: Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems Multicore CPU support Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles) Powerful C++ API Comprehensive performance profiling system Flexible XML-based data structures We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11 Performance from both solutions is impressive. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo averages around 90 frames per second at these settings, and the less expensive HIS HD7950 IceQ averages around 73 frames per second. Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings. Both cards deliver great scores in this older Direct X 10 synthetic benchmark. 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page. 3DMark 11 is an intensive Direct X 11 benchmark, and both cards score as we would expect, around 9,000 and 7,400 points for the HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo & HIS HD7950 IceQ respectively. HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection. There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we. This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis. Read our initial analysis over here HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo & HIS HD7950 IceQ Dial 4 Dial with static pattern 5 Gray Bars 5 Violin 5 Stadium 2:2 5 Stadium 3:2 5 Horizontal Text Scroll 5 Vertical Text Scroll 5 Transition to 3:2 Lock 5 Transition to 2:2 Lock 0 2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video 5 2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video 5 3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed 5 5:5 FPS Animation 5 6:4 12 FPS Animation 5 8:7 8 FPS Animation 5 Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP) 5 Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE) 5 Random Noise: Sailboat 5 Random Noise: Flower 5 Random Noise: Sunrise 5 Random Noise: Harbour Night 5 Scrolling Text 5 Roller Coaster 5 Ferris Wheel 5 Bridge Traffic 5 Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text 5 Roller Coaster 5 Ferris Wheel 5 Bridge Traffic 5 Luminance Frequency Bands 5 Chrominance Frequency Bands 5 Vanishing Text 5 Resolution Enhancement 15 Theme Park 5 Driftwood 5 Ferris Wheel 5 Skin Tones 7 Total 196 A score of 196 points is class leading right now, the ideal solution for high definition media playback on a big screen. F1 2011 is the newest Direct X 11 racing game from industry pioneers CodeMasters. The 2011 Formula One season is the 62nd FIA Formula One season. The original calendar consisted of twenty rounds, including the inaugural running of the Indian Grand Prix before the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Pirelli returns to the sport as tyre supplier for all teams, taking over from Bridgestone. Red Bull Racing are the reigning Constructor’s Champions. Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel is the defending Drivers’ Champion, one of five World Champions appearing on the grid. No problems from either card powering this engine at high settings. Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today. To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparable throughout reviews. This engine has always ran well on AMD hardware and we see very strong, smooth results from both solutions at these settings. Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe. We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum. An Nvidia favourite, however both HIS cards perform well in this test, with perfectly smooth frame rates delivered. Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa. Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made. Very impressive frame rates from the HIS hardware, and much as we would expect at these settings. Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2. Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer. Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today. Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High). Excellent results again, averaging 93 and 114 frames per second at these settings. Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths. Both graphics cards can maintain smooth frame rates at 720p and 1080p, at all times. The HD7970 IceQX² Turbo delivers great frame rates at 1080p. Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007. We enabled the game across three 24 inch screens at 5760×1080 resolution, with the settings shown above. A demanding game at these settings but the HIS hardware is up to the task, averaging 58 fps and 80 fps. According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware. We configured the game to run on three 24 inch monitors at 5760×1080. Good performance results again, with the game perfectly playable across the three monitors. Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter in which the player assumes the role of its titular character, Max Payne. Max Payne 3 features a similar over-the-shoulder camera as its predecessors, with the addition of a cover mechanic, while also retaining much of the same run-and-gun style of gameplay. Max Payne 3 also marks the return of bullet-time in action sequences, for which the franchise is notable. In bullet-time it is possible to see every bullet strike an enemy in detail. New to the series is a “Last Stand” mechanic, which gives the player a grace period after losing all health during which time the player may kill the enemy that wounded them in order to continue playing, however this mechanic is only usable if the player has one or more bottles of painkillers in their possession. For this Max Payne 3 test we set the anti aliasing to 2x and Tessellation to High, enabling Direct X 11. At these settings, the game demanded 1813MB of memory. At these settings this game places a huge demand on the system, especially the graphics card. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo drops a couple of times to just under the sweet spot of 25 frames per second, although for the most part it is perfectly playable. The HIS HD7950 IceQ on the other hand experiences a hard time maintaining smooth frame rates. The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this. Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic. The HIS HD7950 IceQ cooler delivers decent results, peaking at 71c when gaming, and rising to 78c under the synthetic Furmark stress test. The dual fan HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo on the other hand delivers class leading results, peaking at 60c load when gaming, and rising to only 66c when tasked in Furmark. We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635. KitGuru noise guide 10dBA - Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves 20-25dBA – Whisper 30dBA - High Quality Computer fan 40dBA - A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator 50dBA - Normal Conversation 60dBA - Laughter 70dBA - Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer 80dBA - City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal 90dBA - Motorcycle or Lawnmower 100dBA - MP3 player at maximum output 110dBA - Orchestra 120dBA - Front row rock concert/Jet Engine 130dBA - Threshold of Pain 140dBA - Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range) 160dBA - Instant Perforation of eardrum Both cards are very quiet when idle, not registering on our equipment at the rated distance. When gaming the HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo is clearly louder, as both fans are spinning at around 2,200 rpm. The fan on the HD7950 IceQ however only spins up to 1,600rpm which lowers the noise emissions significantly. When tasked with Furmark, the HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo & HIS HD7950 IceQ fan spin up to 2,500 rpm and 2,100 rpm respectively. To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results. In such an energy aware climate, AMD are making a big deal out of their new ‘ZeroCore Power’ technology. Many solutions today use power gating, clock gating and memory compression to reduce idle power requirements, but ZeroCore power technology can completely power down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo consumes significantly more power than the HIS HD7950 IceQ, peaking at 248watts when gaming. The HIS HD7950 IceQ only demands 194 watts when gaming, which is quite good considering the power on tap. To overclock today we are using the latest version of Sapphire’s TriXX software tool. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo can be pushed to just over 1,200mhz on the core, which is a very impressive result. The GDDR5 memory can be pushed to around 1,600mhz (6.4Gbps effective). The HIS HD7950 IceQ has huge overclocking potential, and we managed to overclock the core from 925mhz to 1,083mhz, translating to a 17% increase on the core. There was also plenty of headroom on the memory, overclocking from 1,250mhz to 1,463mhz (5.85Gbps effective). The good overclocking results help push performance into a new level. The manually overclocked HIS HD7950 IceQ for instance manages to outperform the reference clocked AMD HD7970. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo when manually overclocked scores almost 10,000 points, placing it above the last generation HD6990 flagship. There really has never been a better time to buy a graphics card, there are no shortage of choices today regardless of the budget you have available. This does mean that companies such as Sapphire, VTX3D, HIS, XFX, ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI are all working hard to land the sale. The HIS HD7950 IceQ is a very capable video card and one that would be suitable for a wide audience who are currently using a 1080p monitor. It has enough power to drive the latest Direct X 11 games at this resolution and is also very quiet, due to the non aggressive fan profile that HIS have adopted. It does get a little hotter than some other modified HD7950's we have reviewed in recent months, but the low noise levels will appeal to a wide enthusiast audience who want a quiet running system for gaming. The cooler is not the most attractive design however it is perfectly adequate for the task at hand and the design ensures that hot air will be forced outside the case. We are surprised that HIS supplied it in such a modest state of tune, as we were able to overclock the core from 925mhz to 1,083mhz. This had a hugely positive bearing on the frame rate performance as we would expect. HIS do irk me in regards to their marketing and shambolic release methods. They seem to have so many similar cards available which completely confuse the customer. The HIS HD7950 IceQ should be available on Overclockers UK, however if you head to this page then there is only an 800mhz version of this card available for £259.99 inc vat. We aren't sure if Overclockers have the wrong core speed listed, or if this is a different version. Additionally, when we started the review, this card was listed at £239.99 inc vat, and for some reason it jumped in price by £20 Thursday afternoon. OCUK do list a faster version called the "HIS HD 7950 IceQ X² BOOST" which has a superior two fan cooling system and an even higher 950mhz core clock speed, it is listed at £269.99 inc vat. For £10 extra it would seem like a no brainer, but the price point of these cards is getting dangerously close to an entry level HD7970, around £300 inc vat. We are impressed with the card we reviewed, however I am not sure what price, or which configuration will be available to the end user if they buy today online. You can head to this page and try and work it out yourself. Pros: good 'out of box' clock speed and performance. quiet. massive headroom for overclocking. Cons: runs a little hotter than some other modified HD7950's. tough competition. could be clocked much higher Kitguru says: If you can find this card at a good price then its certainly worth buying. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo is undoubtedly a very fast graphics card and one that will suit the high end enthusiast audience budgeting around the £350 price point. The custom cooler on the HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo is remarkable, actually outperforming competitor coolers from Sapphire and ASUS. The dual fan configuration is quite aggressive however, meaning that it is clearly audible when gaming. The ASUS Matrix HD7970 Platinum is much quieter for instance. In regards to gaming performance there is little to fault. The HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo is a much better option if you want to game at 5760x1080 with the latest Direct X 11 titles - as signified with our Max Payne 3 testing today. The range of HIS HD7970 graphics cards is available at Overclockers UK, and again we experienced a similar listing problem. I would assume that this is the same card as the one we reviewed today, although Overclockers UK have the memory speed listed at 5,600mhz when it should actually be 6,000mhz (1,500mhz x 4). At £339.95 inc vat it offers very good value for money, although for £20 extra I would opt for the Sapphire HD7970 Vapor X due to the higher build quality, lower fan noise and enhanced local warranty support. Pros: Very fast good overclocking headroom runs cool. looks great. Cons: a little louder than we would like. fierce competition at this price. Kitguru says: An impressively designed graphics card that is highly recommended.

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HIS HD7970 IceQX² Turbo & HIS HD7950 IceQ Review

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