HIS HD 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo 1GB

INTRODUCTION

“Do I need 1 GB on my video card?" I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked that question the last year or so. Up until pretty recently, my answer has always been “No, you don’t need it." The reason for this has been the fact that most games have simply not needed a frame buffer more than 512 MB. With the release of DirectX10, faster video cards, games that use higher resolution textures as well as monitors with higher resolutions coming down in price, things have changed.

Late in 2008, AMD released an updated version of the HD4870, with 1 GB instead of 512 MB. Today, we are testing the HIS HD 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo 1GB to see what benefits we get from the increased memory size. Is it worth the extra dollars or will a 512 MB card still be enough?

ABOUT HIS

HIS has been around since 1987 and has always strived to produce the highest quality graphic cards in the industry. Whether they have succeeded or not are of course up to you buyers but we have reviewed a lot of their products the last few years and almost always been impressed with the quality of their products.

Their headquarters is in Hong Kong but they sell all over the world. They are one of AMD’s Authorized 1st Tier AIB partner.
One of their first big successes was with the Excalibur line of video cards back in 2002. These days they are quite famous for their IceQ, IceQ II and now IceQ 3 series of cards which uses some very nice and quiet coolers on the cards.