HIS HD 6570 IceQ 1GB Video Card Review

January 4th, 2012 at 3:46 am

Well folks we’ve made it through another entire year. So with the end of the year come and gone, and quite a few things left for us (the editors) to do for Go! Gaming Giant, I thought I’d give you a little something to nibble on. Have a Happy, and Safe, Holidays to all of you and your loved ones, from the entire Go! Gaming Giant Staff.

Now that we’ve gotten all that stuff out of the way, let’s get to the hardware review!!! Today I’ve got a nice entry-level Graphics card for you; the HIS HD 6570 IceQ 1GB. I’m going to state right here in the beginning of this review that this is not a graphics card that is built for gamers. The HIS HD 6570 IceQ 1GB is built mostly for Hi-Def Video Streaming, Multitasking, Blu Ray Playback, as well as some casual gaming. Therefor the regular testing suite I used for the HIS HD 6870 IceQ 1GB is not very relevant here.

Starting off with the front of the box you can see it uses the same familiar color scheme and layout as several other of the IceQ branded HIS video cards. The front gives you some of the general features of the video card such as.

PCI-E 2.1 Support
1GB DDR Memory
Full HD 1080P Resolution Support
HDMI 1.4 Support
Plus AMD HD3D Support (Yes that means 3D Gaming with the proper monitor, sweet!)

I’ve also got some tech specs here, for those of you who fancy numbers. (if you’re female, call me..)

Memory Size – 1024MB DDR3
Engine Clock – 650MHz
Memory Clock – 1.6Gbps
Memory Interface – 128bit
All this equates out to roughly 25.6Gbps of Video Card power.

The back of the box gives you a first look at the video card itself, as well as a multitude of the Features built into the HIS HD 6570 IceQ 1GB. Instead of typing them all out for you here, I’ll just post some pictures… I’m kidding, how lazy do you think I am? (Don’t answer that..) I’d like to point out to HIS that there is a typo on the box, (Do’h!) under UV Sensitive the words “card” and “will” are typed as a single word “cardwill”, just saying….

AMD HD3D (we already covered this, 3D Playback, yummy.)
AMD App Acceleration ( a nifty little setting that helps speed up programs such as web browsers and Microsoft Office, etc..)
AMD CrossFire X (take this little puppy and throw in another one and you got your self a mean, red, fighting machine.)
DirectX 11 Support (a common staple among AMD products since the launch of the 5k Series)
AMD PowerPlay Power Management (if you’re into the whole saving the ecosystem thing)
Plus HIS has won over 1300 awards, seriously… Food for thought there.

Something not mentioned on the box, but definitely worth noting is that the HIS HD 6570 IceQ 1GB utilizes the latest version of tessellation rendering to help not only make the game look better, but to also increase performance.

Inside the box, as is common practice by HIS, is another box. Although this may irritate those with no patience, I actually find it a bit relieving. Knowing that even if the outer box is damaged there is a whole nother box inside that one. The box comes in a very refreshing Light Blue/Tealish color (hey, I review hardware, not colors!) And inside that Light Blue/Tealish box, concealed in plastic is the video card, as well as the Driver & Installation Guide.

This has got to be the cutest little video card I’ve ever seen. It has the same cooler design as its’ big brothers in the IceQ line, but it’s so tiny. As you can see the fan it roughly 30% the size of the entire PCB, which equates to damn good cooling. Although one thing that confuses me is the fact that it clearly states the HIS HD 6570 supports Crossfire X, there is no Crossfire connnector to be found on this card… Interesting..

Jumping to the front of the card, first thing of note is that this is a two slot video card, for those of you who own Micro ATX Motherboards or have a sound card in the slot directly below the PCI-E, make sure you check to make sure you have two open slots. Secondly we can see it has the three essential video connectors for today’s day and age — HDMI, VGA, DVI, ’nuff said. And before you ask, yes, the HDMI supports full 3D support as well as support for Dolby TrueHD and DTSHD Audio sources

This view looking top/down on the video card you can get a peak at the aluminum heatsink underneath the shroud that helps absorb the heat to be dissipated by the fan.

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CPU Usage While Watching a Blu Ray

Now for the fun stuff; no not the game performance silly. We’re going to start with Blu Ray Playback! I saw the CPU usage vary only slightly while playing back a full 1080P Blu Ray on my PC with the HIS HD 6570 IceQ 1GB Video card, the CPU Usage sat right at 5% while watching The Town on Blu Ray, but spiked all the way up to a whopping 8% when watching the more intense scenes of one of my all time favorites; Inception. For reference even just a mere two generations ago watching a Hi-Def movie usually utilized 60%+ of your CPU do to the fact that video cards didn’t have the technology at the time to help alleviate that load. Goes to show you how far video card tech has really come in just the last 2-3 years.

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Temperatures

Getting temperature readings on this video card was extremely boring, the HIS HD 6570 runs so silently and quietly that most of the time it’s the quietest component in my PC case, hands down. Below you can see temperature readings from 10 minutes idling at Desktop, one hour of intense gaming, and one hour of watching Inception on Blu Ray.

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Game Performance

Crysis

Though Gaming performance is not the biggest selling point of this card, at moderate settings with a mid-level resolution the HIS HD 5670 1GB IceQ handles Crysis pretty well all things considering.

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I cannot seem to do a hardware review without including Skyrim, why? Because this game is great for every kind of benchmark possible. The HIS HD 6570 tears through Skyrim at low and mid-level resolutions with no problem. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the performance brought to the table by this dynamite little video card.

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Overall, if you’re looking for a video card to play games at super high resolutions with max settings, look elsewhere. For all those other people looking for a card to do; moderate video editing, watch HD videos either by streaming or blu ray playback, light gaming, or just simple tasks such as web surfing and typing up documents (which the 6570 actually improves performance in) then you have found the right card.

Great optimization for HD Video playback, runs extremely frosty, and has decent gaming performance at light to moderate settings. The HIS HD 6570 sure does bring quite a bit to the table for such a low price. Highly recommended to the entry-level consumer.

A quick explanation of the award system. We have the main award category with three awards; Bronze (Good Overall Product), Silver (Great Overall Product), and Gold (Excellent/Near Perfect Overall Product) as the highest. Then we have two different Sub-Categories, Internal Hardware Awards for performance; Yellow (Low-End Performer), Orange (Mid-Range Performer), and Red (High-End Performer) as the highest. The third and final Sub-Category is for both Internal Hardware and External Peripherals; Black (Enthusiast/Gamer Qualities), Blue (Exceptional Build and Design), Green (Terrific Dollar To Performance Ratio)

Pros: