Caporegime
Product homepage - http://www.hisdigital.com/gb/product2-730.shtml
I have here a HIS 7970 X Turbo 3GB (with Boost) IceQ X² GFX card for show.
A little bit about HIS,
This particular card has a core speed of 1120MHz with a boost clock of 1180MHz which from a look around at competitor cards I think is the fastest clocked out of the box, the RAM is clocked at the same 1.5GHz (6GHz) as found on reference AMD GHz cards. Besides theses clock speeds the card also features a IceQ X2 cooling solution and even better, support for six screen Eyefinity. This is achieved by HIS fitting two extra mini-displayports and also a button on the rear of the card that will flip between five and six screen support by turning the dual link DVI port into a single link connection.
The power circuitry of the card is also redesigned and now features 18+1+1 power phases, the card requires two 8pin PCI-E power cables to run.
Box and accessories.
Included in the box are,
• Dirt Showdown voucher.
• Crossfire bridge
• DVI-VGA adapter
• Installation disk and envelope.
• Active mini-displayport to single link DVI adapter (an accessory worth £24 - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=gx-058-hs&groupid=1929&catid=1757).
• weight lifter.
the card.
300mm in length.
The display connectors, the blue button is the 5 to 6 screen Eyefinity switch, it achieves this by turning the dual link DVI port into a single link and then it can run the extra mini-displayport.
This card requires two 8pin PCI-E connectors.
Wish the PCB was black as black goes with everything.
These are the power phase LED's, it changes from green-yellow-red depending on the load.
Six voltage read points, but for a strange design reason they are not labelled on this side of the PCB.
The IceQ X2 cooler fitted to this card uses two 89mm fans.
Copper base and five heatpipes (3x 6mm and 2x 8mm).
The card is nice and quiet with the fan control set to auto within the included software, the average RPM is around 1800RPM and increasing to approximately 2200RPM during benchmark runs when I overclocked the card.
The maximum fan speed available is 3900RPM.
The power circuitry.
Tahiti XT core features 2,048 stream processors.
Fan noise.
Below is a video I have made of me manually adjusting the fan speed and hopefully giving some impression of what to expect. The card while gaming never gets loud at the stock clocks and remains in the lower speed range as shown by the green LED glow.
The LED goes from green-Blue-Purple-Red as the speed increases.
Temperatures.
The temperatures below were the maximum reached while gathering the fps data by GPU-Z logging the sensors.
Overclocking.
I used the iTurbo utility to overclock this card, the latest is available to download here - http://www.hisdigital.com/gb/download.shtml
This looks like a very easy to use and understand tweaking program with a good voltage range for the core and memory.
Pressing the iTurbo button increases the speeds from 1180/1500MHz for the core and memory to 1191/1515Mhz respectively.
The cooler and quiter mode just alters the fan speed settings.
But for some reason the actual performance of the card decreased a little bit compared to when it is at the boosted speed of 1180/1500MHz, I tried raising the power limit, messing with the voltages wondering if that was causing this odd performance drop, but it had zero effect.
Deciding to overclock the card myself I was able to get the card fully stable in all games and benchmarks with the following settings, but your own results may vary.
Core clock = 1275MHz
VDDC = 1312mV
Memory clock = 1675MHz (6700MHz effective)
MVDDC = 1531mV
Board power limit = +20%
Not too bad, but being braver and deciding to do a few suicide runs I was able to get the card to 1285MHz/1700MHz (6800MHz effective) with more VDDC/MVDDC and then run the new 3Dmark benchmark - http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/519337
Then with the core at 1300MHz and the memory at 1740MHz (6960MHz) I ran Unigine Heaven Benchmark,
And then I ran the 3Dmark11 benchmark - http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6395431
These tests completed without any artefacts visible on screen.
Also please note that I certainly am not an "extreme" overclocker, but even so, I am more than happy with the above results.
Performance.
Fraps was used where an in-built benchmark was not available and this recorded the framerate for 60 seconds.
Alan Wake is maxed out.
Unigen Heaven4.0 and Valley tests were run at the same setting as used in the GFX card forum, then ran again at a higher 1920X1200 resolution which is the max of my monitor.
Bioshock Infinite is maxed out.
Tomb Raider is maxed out.
Dirt3 is maxed out but for 8xmsaa for the 7970 and 8xqcsaa for the GTX670 according to the results file.
Image quality.
Below are some ingame screenshots captured by FRAPS in BMP format.
The top one of each pair is from the 7970, the second is from the GTX670.
Final thoughts.
I have been using this card for a month now and have played through some of the latest games on the market, the 7970 has absolutely eaten them up at very high if not maximum detail settings with a good dollop of AA+AF included for good measure and also at an above average resolution of 1920X1200 (1920X1080 being the most common screen size used today), the playing experience has been spot on. It is well reported that prior to the latest handful of drivers the ATI cards have been accused of frame lagging/spiking and not giving as good as experience compared to an equivalent Nvidia card. As I only ever used Catylst 13.3beta2 and then beta3 I never experienced this frame spiking in games.
The HIS 7970 X Turbo IceQ is the fastest out-of-the-box 7970 avalible with excellent stock speeds yet with room enough to overclock even higher. The cooler is absolutely fantastic with strong performance and low noise during my testing and gaming.
Pros.
• Superb performance out of the box.
• Excellent cooling solution.
• Good overclocking/Voltage unlocked.
Cons.
• Not cheap.
• Need a higher resolution monitor or Eyefinity setup to make the most of the card.
• Blue PCB may not be to everyones taste.
Thanks to Ethermaster for the graph design.