Review: HIS 6570 IceQ Video Card

Digital Hippos Hardware Corner Test Rig

Intel i5-2500k @ 4.3ghz

Corsair H50 CPU Water Cooling

Corsair AX850 Professional Series PSU

8 gig of Corsair XMS RAM

Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD4-B3 Motherboard

OCZ Vertex II SSD 120 gig Hard Drive

HP 2170m 27" LCD Monitor @ 1920x1080

Antec 900 ATX Case

HIS HD6570 IceQ Video Card

HIS Digital based in Hong Kong continues to pump out amazing products, and their gaming video cards continue to impress us here at the DH Hardware Corner. One of the biggest challenges in PC gaming today is affording to build and/or upgrade your gaming rig. That time is coming to an end as you can play the latest PC games for around $75 with this bad boy. Let's dive in!

Design

The high quality continues on with the 6570 IceQ. It is a very small and short card but it is incredibly solid and well-built. The IceQ cooler definitely looks amazing on this little beast, and I was nothing but impressed with the design and look of the card. There are VGA, DVI and HDMI connections so you won't be left hurting for options in connections. Also, see the photos? There is no external power connector! It's amazing to be playing Skyrim on a card that requires nothing more than a 400 watt power supply. Huge Kudos to HIS for this amazing card design and good looks to boot.

Cool as Ice... Q!

Performance

Even with a solid design, I was still very curious of how the 6570 performed in today's latest games. The results were nothing short of amazing with expectations kept in check. Now, you can't run the latest games maxed out with 8xAA, but you can run most games at 1920x1080 with lower settings. At lower resolutions like 1440x900 or 1680x1050, you can crank those settings up. Crysis Warhead, Battlefield 3, Portal 2, Star Wars:  The Old Republic and even Skyrim ran good at lower settings at 1920x1080. Now, if you run at 1280x720 or around that resolution, you can run most of the those games at high settings! Amazing for a ~$75 card. Color me impressed. I was most surprised with Skyrim's performance. I was able to run on high settings (without AA) at 1920x1080! Check out the video to see how some games ran, even maxed out.

No rain on this parade -- I ran Skyrim on high settings with this card!

Overclocking and Temperatures

While the overclocking capabilities of this card are limited (What do you expect?!), I did get a small core upgrade from 650 to 675 and the memory from 1600 to 1800. This will squeeze a few frames out in same games. That being said, whether at stock or overclock, this card runs incredible quiet and cool. The IceQ cooler is one my favorite technologies in video cards today. At idle, I was only around 29 degrees Celsius (C), and even under heavy gaming loads, I never got over 45 C! Stunning, quiet, and cool. This card rocks.

(All our gameplay footage is recorded at 1080p. On some games, as we lowered settings and resolution, the gameplay was much smoother. So in summary, this card is more suited for 1680x1050 or lower res gaming).