HIS Radeon HD 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo

Compared to those reference clock speeds, HIS have chosen to up both core and memory clocks on the IceQ 4+ Turbo.  The board's RV770 core gets a very modest rise of just 20MHz to leave us with a core clock speed of 770MHz, while the board's GDDR5 memory gets more attention lavished upon it, increasing the clock speed from 900MHz to 1GHz, giving us an effective speed of 4GHz considering the properties of GDDR5 memory.

This being HIS, this board also does away with the reference cooler, in favour of a dual-slot, heatpipe based offering which is also UV sensitive, meaning that it'll glow a shade of blue if you put any UV lights close enough to it in your chassis.  That (and similarly blue coloured PCB aside), we find all of the usual features of a Radeon HD 4870 in place, from its two six-pin PCI Express power connectors to give the board the juice it requires through to the two CrossFire inter-GPU connectors to team up two, three or four Radeon HD 4870 parts in such a configuration.

Nothing exciting to mention on the rear of the card, but here it is anyhow.

In profile, we get a better look at the IceQ 4+ Turbo's dual-slot cooler, which exhausts hot air out of the rear of your chassis (which is always a good thing).  That aside, the board features a pair of gold-plated dual-link DVI outputs (which can be converted to HDMI), together with TV-out functionality.

Bundle

So, we've seen the actual board now, but how does it appear on retail shelves?  Let's take a peek.

If nothing else, HIS know a pretty shade of blue when they see one, with this really rather subtly beautiful box art agreeing with my artist nature.  Putting that aside, some of the major features of the IceQ 4+ Turbo are duly noted here as well.

 

The rear of the box let's us take a look inside at the board itself, while also pointing out its salient features.

To keep pricing where it needs to be, this board doesn't bundle any full games, instead focusing on the essentials - Aside from the board itself, the IceQ's bundle features a driver CD, paper manuals, HIS case sticker, CrossFire inter-GPU connector and both a DVI to HDMI and DVI to VGA converter.