HIS HD 5750 IceQ+ 1GB

Sporting the familiar HIS IceQ cooling setup, this 5750 aims to keep things cool and quiet. Should bode well for overclocking then, and look good to boot.

Specifications

The box for the HIS Radeon HD 5750 IceQ+ 1GB follow the latest HIS design of a white based box with images of cold and ice and weaponry. We have an iced up Excalibur and of course all the major features of the card on the front, while the rear provides more detail about what you are getting. HIS also throw in a rather handy 1-in-7 tool with a torch, screwdriver set, brush and spirit level included.

Inside the box, everything is kept inside another blue box and carefully packed into a clear plastic insert. Besides the card itself, you also get a two 4 pin Molex to one 6 pin PCIe power adapter, a Crossfire bridge, a DVI to VGA adapter, the Toolkit, a coupon for Colin McRae's DiRT 2 (Steam Download) and the HIS Software CD including the driver, installation and manual guide, and the 3D OS Bumptop software.

You can instantly see the difference between the HIS Radeon HD 5750 IceQ+ 1GB and a reference card, as the HIS card sports the big blue cooling setup. This does make it a little bigger than the standard card but honestly there isn't much in it. The fan used on the cooler certainly has plenty of fins and in use it is extremely quiet at all load levels.

At the rear of the card we find a single PCIe power input. Flipping the card around we can see the IO panel which sports the usual three outputs we have come to expect on 57xx series cards; a DVI, an HDMI and a DisplayPort. Above is the grilled exhaust for the cooler.

Turning the card over we can see that there is half of the included GDDR5 on the room but this isn't cooled in anyway. The cooler is held on by a cross brace on the rear. You can also see the cooler hangs just over the rear edge of the card a little.

Since this is the HIS IceQ+ cooling setup, that does mean it's UV reactive, which if you've not seen this before it is pretty neat under a UV light. You have to admit it does look really good but I wonder if there is enough of a market now to start offering other colours? Red/Orange perhaps? Blue is universally safe and it does look good but blue has been the colour for PC modding/lighting for a while now and other colours are starting to make an appearance in cases.

Testing

Test Setup: Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 @ 3.20GHz, 4GB of OCZ PC2-6400 Ram @ 960MHz, Asus Blitz Formula, Maxtor Diamondmax 10 7200 250GB HDD, Asetek Waterchill Watercooling, Hyper Type M 730w PSU. All latest drivers as of December 2009 and the OS is Windows 7.

For comparison, we are using a reference Radeon HD 5770 card.

Software

Left 4 Dead 2 – Recording a custom demo on the Dead Center – Hotel level (inside in the inferno), we used FRAPS to record frame rates as we played back the demo on all cards at same settings.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – ETQW gives us our lone OpenGL test results as we run through a recorded demo on the Slipgate level. Settings for all cards were the same.

Colin McRae DiRT2 – DiRT2 has some very good looking visuals and provides us with our first DirectX 11 test. We used FRAPS with the games inbuilt benchmark to test a quick run around a London track.

Assassin's Creed – We headed for the nearest tower from the bureau roof in Acre and repeatedly climbed to the top. With 2 leaps of faith and a good look of the city from on high, we once again used FRAPS to record our frame rates. Settings for each card were set to highest possible for that card.

Crysis Warhead – We used the Framebuffer benchmark tool to run through the Ambush demo and recorded the results with FRAPS. Settings for each card were set to highest possible for that card.

Devil May Cry 4 (Benchmark) – DMC4's benchmark provides a nice way of testing that anyone can do. Results are all from the benchmark itself, and include average frame rates as well as 4 graphs for each level tested. Settings for all cards were the same.