HIS Radeon HD 6570 Ice Q Review

Last updated on 2012-02-01 by Tom.cpcr in Reviews

Conclusion

In my opinion there are three different groups of users who could really benefit from a card like this.

The first group is HTPC owners with maybe an older machine who need a video card that’ll help improve HD playback or something of that nature. This is an excellent choice for that group of individuals because it’s near silent, it’s more than capable of handling HD video, and it’s very small which means a lot of flexibility when it comes to different sized cases.

The second is the casual gamer group. Considering the fact that according to the Steam hardware survey, approximately 20%-25% Steam gamers are still running resolutions 1280×1024 or under, I think this is an excellent graphics card for those gamers out there in that category who like to play a game from time to time, but aren’t serious enough to blow $200 on a graphics card.

The final group deals with people who own an older OEM system (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.). Many of these OEM systems come with small cases, terrible cooling, and weak power supplies that don’t even include PCI-E connectors making it very difficult to install high end graphics. This graphics card would be perfect for someone just looking to get by a little while longer.

What’s Hot

For the record, I don’t buy low end graphics cards, so when I received this one for review I didn’t have high expectations… at all. I thought this was going to be the card that struggled with everything past CS 1.6, but oh was I wrong. Yeah, this card got destroyed at 1920×1200, high settings, and 4xAA, but can you even expect it not to? I mean, if that were the case, there would be no reason to purchase $200, $300, $400, or $500 graphics cards.

That being said, the HIS Radeon HD6570 IceQ’s overclocking, cooling, and acoustic performance were most impressive. You can’t deny that the card easily managed to pull off a full 160MHz Core (+25%) overclock and the temperatures never passed 47°C despite the fans being almost completely inaudible.

Additionally, I was also surprised by card’s performance as it ran through almost all benchmarks at 1280×1024, medium settings at playable frame rates. After overclocking, this card should even run Crysis 2 quite comfortably at low settings since it could already produce almost 25fps at medium.

What’s Not

The first issue is that this is a dual slot card. This means that you must have enough room in your case for two slots, which may be problematic for people with extremely small form factor cases. Of course, this is the tradeoff for good graphics cooling, so it’ll be up to you to decide what’s more important.

Next, I feel like voltage controls should’ve been unlocked. The graphics card has such great overclocking potential, but it still feels neutered. I can easily see it hitting 900MHz or 1GHz with a little more juice even potentially matching the performance of the higher end HD 6700 series graphics cards. It’s a real pity. I was just getting to like this card.

Finally, you have to admit that while the card is a good value for the 25% gamers out there with monitors 1280×1024, it’s still not a miracle worker for the other 75% gamers with monitors at higher resolution.

Bottom Line

At the end of the day, this is still a fantastic card for the price. The insane overclocking bit is just icing on the cake. It’s cute, quiet, and cheap. Girlfriend need a new graphics card to play The Sims? This is it.

The HIS Ice Q HD 6570 IceQ is currently available on Amazon.