HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition Review

Overview

 

Hot on the heels of the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition, I now have the chance to take a look at the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition (H797QMC3G2M). This version is pretty much the same as the XElemnets version but without the additional video outputs, if the performance is anything like its predecessor, we should be looking at one serious ‘kick ass’ card, we shall see…

The GHz Edition of AMD’s Tahiti GPU is the same as found in the standard 7970 with a couple of basic exceptions. The first is that the clock speed of the new GHz Edition has been upped and is now 75MHz higher than a basic 7970 (925MHz), this has been achieved solely through chip binning (the GPU is identical!). In addition to this there’s AMD’s Power Tune technology with Boost allowing the card to Turbo up to 1050MHz (not dissimilar to the Boost Clock found on Nvidia Kepler cards such as the MSI GTX 680 TWIN FROZR (OC Edition)).

The HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition features a Core Clock of 1000MHz with a Boost of 1050MHz while the memory is clocked at 1500MHz (6 GHz effective). It features 3GB of GDDR5 memory and supports PCIE Express 3.0 (and is also backward compatible). The card also has the ability to drive up to 4 displays via its outputs (x2 DisplayPort, x1 HDMI, x1 DVI).

 

 

The HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition comes in the synonymous HIS blue and white box, with various features of the card showcased on the front. Two of the main features highlight that the card runs 17 degrees cooler and 15db quieter than the reference design. There is also a sticker informing you of the inclusion of the HIS overclocking software iTurbo. The left side of the box unusually lists the System Requirements for the card and of particular interest is the call for a 500W+ power supply!

The back of the box highlights many features of the card itself including the 1300+ awards that HIS has won from major media worldwide and also the following:

 

FEATURES

• Cooler HIS 7970 IceQ X² is 17 degrees cooler than the Reference Cooler.

• Quieter HIS 7970 IceQ X² is 15db quieter than the Reference Cooler, significantly reducing noise level.

• 5 Heatpipes Optimize cooling performance by removing heat from the core area, providing ultimate solution for professional gamers and HTCP users.

• IceQ Cooling Technology The super large 29.5 x 11.2 cm dual axis fans draw massive amounts of cool air to cool the GPU directly.

 

HIGH QUALITY COMPONENTS

• 6 Dynamic Phase Control PWM IC HIS cards are something more! The 6 Dynamic Control PWM IC phases provide extra power, stability and overclocking capability to the card!

• Full Solid State Capacitors These capacitors, of the highest quality and durability, extend the lifespan of the card. You can count on HIS cards to game hard for 24/7/365 for years!

• Solid State Choke Using only the finest material, HIS cards offer outstanding stability and power capacity – making the best out of power and unleashing clock speeds to the limit!

 

 

Within the box lies a single black inner box with an HIS logo; on opening the inner box you can see that the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition was extremely well packaged with soft foam, which is always good to see. You also get to see that rather smart HIS IceQ X² cooler for the first time.

 

 

Beneath the card itself is an additional tray, remove this and you will find a CrossFire Bridge, DisplayPort to DVI adapter, DVI-I to VGA adapter, PCI-e Installation Instructions, iTurbo CD and HIS Wallet.

 

 

Within the wallet you will find the HIS install CD, Multi-Language Quick Installation Guide and a HIS Power Up label.

At the time of this review the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition is retailing for approximately £410 and comes with a 2 year warranty.

 

Specifications/Features

courtesy of HIS

* Additional details available here

 

First Impressions

 

First impressions of the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition are good, in particular that cooler is a work of art (even if I have seen it before!), it’s certainly one of the nicest looking coolers that I have seen in a while. The reason for this is down to the simple elegance of the whole thing; No crazy colours, no silly shapes just a cool (sorry!) looking cooler. I’m sure the images don’t really do it justice…

 

 

The cooler itself features x2 8.9cm dual axial fans, with x3 6mm heatpipes and a further x2 8mm heatpipes.

The cooler (inc. shroud) is very large as you can see, at approximately 297mm long, certainly in comparison to my usual test card (MSI GTX 680 TWIN FROZR (OC Edition) 256mm in length), it’s definitely worth checking it fits in your case before buying.

 

 

Looking at the side of the card you can see 3 of the 5 heatpipes and the size of the underlying heatsink, this stretches all the way to the back of the card (and even beyond the PCB) in an attempt to soak up as much of the heat as possible. Obviously all of this metal adds to the weight of the card, weighing in at a whopping 951grams, that’s 162grams more than the MSI GTX 680.

At the far end of the card are the 2 power connectors both 8 pin, which is also nice to see as you don’t end up with odd cable ends flapping around inside your case!

 

 

As you can see the card features a blue PCB, although I would have preferred this to be black, as this allows it to match any colour rig build that you may have (guess it’s OK if your rig’s blue!). There’s not much to talk about when it comes to the back of the card, but from one of the stickers you can see that there’s some quality control taking place; always good to see.

On the opposite side of the card you can again see more of the heatpipes on display.

 

 

As you can see from the outputs on the back plate the card features x2 Mini DisplayPort outputs, x1 Dual-link DVI-I and x1 HDMI.

Looking at the far end of the card gives you a chance to see how big that heatsink is, big enough for you?

 

 

Hardware Installation

 

Installation into My Test Rig was predictably a straightforward affair and despite the card’s length it fitted fine within my test Corsair Vengeance C70 case. With the x2 8-pin power connectors connected, I was good to go…

 

 

Testing Methodology/Setup

 

My Test Rig was treated to a fresh install of Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit (Service Pack 1) with all associated drivers also installed. The latest version of the AMD Catalyst Control Center was used (version 12.8).

 

 

The HIS iTurbo software was used to help with overclocking, version 1.2.1 was downloaded and installed, it can be found here.

 

 

The HIS iTurbo software consists of 5 main screens:

• Home Here you can keep track of HIS related news as well as updates to the latest AMD Drivers, along with links to HIS Social Media
• Info The second screen provides an array of information regarding the selected Graphics Card, with the ability to save the info to a file
• Overclock The main overclocking screen, with control over Core/Mem speeds as well as Power and Voltages, 5 Profiles are supported
• FanControl This screen allows you to switch between Automatic, Fixed and Custom with 2 Profiles supported (Cooler & Quieter)
• Settings Here you can modify various HIS GPU settings

 

Overclocking the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition

 

Overclocking the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition was much like (read identical!) to overclocking the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition via the HIS iTurbo software. By first upping the Board Power Limit to its maximum of 20%, it was just a matter of tweaking the GPU Clock and Memory Clock sliders until instability and or artefacts became evident.

I managed to get to 1200Mhz on the Core and 1600MHz on the Memory easily, pushing beyond this saw artefacts beginning to show while running Unigine Heaven. Adding more voltage didn’t seem to help (very similar to other Radeon cards recently tested!).

So after overclocking the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition I ended up with a 14 % overclock on the core (a 20% overclock from a stock GHz Edition 7970) and a 7% increase on the memory, considering that this is a factory overclocked card to begin with, that’s a pretty good result.

 

Benchmarks Used:

Games Played:

• Blacklight Retribution
• Borderlands 2
• Torchlight II

 

Hardware Performance

 

HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition Stock Settings (Core: 1000MHz / Boost: 1050MHz / Mem: 6000MHz )

Benchmark	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temp	Result
3DMark 11	19.00	57.00	38.00	9410
Unigine Heaven	19.50	61.00	41.50	1177
Metro 2033	19.50	62.00	42.50	40.33 FPS
Sleeping Dogs	19.50	65.00	45.50	48.1 FPS

 

HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition Overclocked Settings (Core: 1000MHz / Boost: 1200MHz / Mem: 6400MHz )

Benchmark	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temp	Result
3DMark 11	19.50	62.00	42.50	10315
Unigine Heaven	19.50	63.00	43.50	1339
Metro 2033	20.00	64.00	44.00	44.00 FPS
Sleeping Dogs	19.50	67.00	47.50	53.0 FPS

 

HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition – vs – MSI GTX 680 TWIN FROZR (OC Edition)

* All of the data used here is with the cards at their highest stable overclocks…

Graphics Card	3DMark 11	Unigine Heaven	Metro 2033	Sleeping Dogs
HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition	10315	1339	44.00 FPS	53.00
MSI GTX 680 TWIN FROZR (OC Edition)	10726	1335	34.67 FPS	N/A

 

As you can see from the benchmark scores the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition beats the GTX 680 in two (apologies as I don’t have Sleeping Dogs data for GTX 680) of the four benchmarks, these two benchmarks (Unigine Heaven & Metro 2033) are also the most real world benchmarks from a Gaming point of view.

The HIS 7970 dominates in the Metro 2033 test, this is helped by the fact that the 7970 has 3GB of VRAM as opposed the the GTX 680 that only has 2GB. The Unigine test is very close indeed and the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition needs all of its overclocked horsepower to beat the GTX 680. For some reason the 7970 doesn’t fair well in the 3DMark 11 test, this is now common knowledge, as all of the new Nvidia Kepler based GPUs seem to have a significant advantage over AMD based GPUs in 3DMark 11!?

These results show that the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition can easily hold it’s own against an overclocked GTX 680 where Gaming is concerned, what’s strange is when we look at the results compared to card’s bigger brother the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition as the numbers differ, more than one would expect. In the 3DMark 11 this card is noticeably faster (10315 vs 10095) than the X Elements version the same is true of the Metro 2033 benchmark (44.0 vs 42.0), it was only in the Unigine test (1339 vs 1352) that this card couldn’t keep up. Now I double checked these results too, so I’m a little perplexed, but a damn fine showing considering the X Elements version cost around £50 more…

From a thermals and noise point of view the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition has performed really well with the card never getting much above 68 degrees Celsius; impressive as these temperatures were recorded after overclocking a factory overclocked card, nice one HIS! Even more impressive is that it managed this with the card’s dual fans never being heard much above the noise of the case fans in my Corsair Vengeance C70.

Throughout the time I have been testing this card (over 2 weeks) the card has performed faultlessly in all the games that I have played, no artefacts or crashes were noted during normal game-play.

 

Final Thoughts

 

Wow! The HIS 7970 X GHz Edition was good, but this card, the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition (H797QMC3G2M) is better, why? Because it offers everything that most Gamers want at a damn good price, what more do I need to say…

The card comes extremely well packaged, something that has been noted with all HIS cards that we have tested and at the time of writing many vendors are also shipping with a free copy of Sleeping Dogs (damn good game too!) as part of an AMD promotion. The card is beautifully built and comes with a great looking and efficient cooler. Although you will need to be careful that this beast can fit in your case as it’s 297mm long!

The card may not have the additional LEDs and outputs of its bigger brother the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition but then it costs noticeably less and performs just as well and even better in some cases! Add the fact that I managed to overclock the card easily above and beyond the factory overclock, the card was relatively quiet and that the cooler kept the temperatures below 70 degrees Celcius; it would appear that HIS has a really good card on it’s hands.

If I were to be in the market for a top performing Video Card (aren’t I always!), then the HIS 7970 IceQ X² GHz Edition would be at the top of my list.

 

Verdict