While HIS has a much better built quality and in a reasonable prize, you can take my word for it or someone else then, that His is a more ATi third party makers like Sapphire, but the ego of His is a more on the cooling performance and the amount of speed than their most third party graphics solutions can do with the reasonable prize of course. HIS is by all, a complete rival to the Sapphire team on ATi card makers. While I prefer the HIS as a graphics card maker for ATI, the NVIDIA town is more of a smoke screen over it with no doubt of what is going to happen afterwards, with a recall of their 9-series to be renamed to the new GT name, giving more confusing to NVIDIA buyers out there and the intro of the new GTX295, and having some problems in both hardware performance and software compatibility.
Just as we have enough of the brawl in NVIDIA, ATi just fills the gaps with graphics solution for all of the gamers or even media people need, HIS made the 4670 IceQ a mid ranged graphics solution for moderate gamers and normal PC users. The 4670 architecture is just similar to the Sapphire 4650, by the core design; a 55nm fabrication and also the same RV730 core, but to separate the core are the last letters in the core code, pro for the 4650, and TX in the 4670 but most of them are a a real close cousin to the 4870 and the 4850. Plus the 4670 has a boost in memory and core frequencies, 750MHz and 1800MHz respectively. Also with something different from the more budget card is a dual slot cooling array, but not that exceptionally large, able to suck in cool air inside the case and push it out in the back, going to cool the core and the chip at 37 in Idle and 48 degrees in load but able to pretty good for most of the light to medium level loads but still able to stick in some more cycles in the frequency.
For the performance test in the HIS 4670 IceQ is by far much better than the 4650’s show just going much faster frame rates in most of the older games while it handled better in Crysis, but still having that sacrifice. Also this has a Crossfire bridge, so you can enable crossfireX for increase of performance –though no sign of a bundled crossfire bridge. It may be probably it is for of a Intel G43 chipset arrangement, with only a single PCIex slot for the graphics, but if you are lucky enough to have a dual slot PCIex motherboard; you better find that bridge bundled in your mobo.
Sounds very interesting!