HIS HD3850 IcqQ3 Turbo X

HIS have never had problems designing attractive boxes and the HD3850 IceQ Turbo X sure doesn’t disappoint when it comes to looks. The front has all the specs (including GPU and memory speeds) nicely listed, so a quick glimpse is all that’s needed to decide if this card is what you are looking for.

Inside, the card is nicely protected with a plastic casing, holding it firmly in place. The rest of the packaging, namely the driver CD, DVI-to-VGA, DVI-to-HDMI and TV-out converters, the manual booklet plus the free Valve games (don’t get your hopes up, it is just Lost Coast and HL2: Deathmatch) are all nicely tucked away and don’t endanger the card. A pretty bland deal, wouldn’t you agree? Well perhaps not …

The HIS Universal PC Enthusiast Tool

Did you ever buy a new graphics card and try to install it, only to find you didn’t have a screwdriver handy? Or you were trying to tighten a screw on the motherboard, but couldn’t see a thing because of all the cables and shadows they were casting? Well, apparently somebody at HIS is familiar with the above experiences and decided to include the ultimate geek’s tool into the packaging. This screwdriver/flashlight/water scale has everything you’ll ever need inside a PC case. We’ve found plenty of different extras in video card packaging’s before – stuff like free games, game controllers and even case LEDs. But this screwdriver beats them all.

The card itself looks very unorthodox for an AMD branded product – it’s entirely blue! As far as specifictions go, the Turbo X is a reference Radeon HD3850 pushed to the extreme – the GPU runs at a blazing 735MHz while the 512Mb of DDR3 memory ticks happily at 1.96GHz.

The cooler on the card is impressive to look at, but as a result the card takes two slots instead of just one (like the reference HD3850 cards do). The tradeoff is that the cooler is near noiseless and pushes the hot air generated by the card straight out of the case, lowering the chassis temperature in the process as well.

On the external side of the card there are the standard 3 output connectors – two dual-DVI ones and a TV-Out socket. With the help of the supplied HDMI adapter you can use one of the DVI ports as a fully compliant HDMI source. On the other side of the card we can find the single PCI-Express power connector.

Like it’s faster brothers, the HD3850 uses a 256 Bit memory bus, a step down from the (in this aspect) faster HD2900 series. On the other hand the 320 unified shaders mean the card is similar in performance the HD3870. In fact, the only real difference between the HD3850 and HD3870 are the lower GPU and memory speeds. This generally means a lower pixel and texture fillrate as well as a lower memory bandwidth.

Reference HD3850 cards come equipped with 256 or 512Mb of DDR3 memory, making it impossible to catch up with a DDR4 equipped HD3870. The otherwise single slot cooling solution also makes overclocking a reference HD3850 to HD3870 levels impossible. As a tradeoff, the cards are considerably cheaper.