HIS Radeon RX 480 Features A Custom IceQX2 Cooler And An Intelligent Fan Control Software

The IceQX2 cooler from HIS for the Radeon RX 480 has been pictured featuring a custom cooler. In addition to providing upgraded cooling performance, the HIS IceQX2 custom cooler also sports an intelligent fan controller software that can work in your favor, unless of course the temperature of the surrounding is varied.

HIS Radeon RX 480 IceQX2 Has A Metallic Fan Shroud And Employs 0dB Technology

Courtesy of VideoCardz, the HIS custom cooler has several goodies that are not found in the reference coolers. Starting off, there is a metallic back-plate that will deliver more integrity to the entire GPU and will also aid in dropping the temperature of the product to a certain extent. There is also a metallic fan shroud which will once again increase the physical strength of the entire GPU, but also increase its weight slightly. In addition to LED illumination, there is one unique thing that HIS has included for its custom RX 480 that we have not seen till now on non-reference graphic cards.

That is the 0dB technology; this means that the fans will not spin unless the temperature reaches a certain level. While this is helpful to maintain the strength of the fan bearing, it is kind of pointless for those who are living in hot and humid environments since the ambient temperature is always expected to be high. There could be a way to disable this feature entirely, but it is helpful for those who do not find the noise emanating from the GPU all too comforting.

The custom-made GPU is going to carry a higher price tag, but we do not know what HIS has intended for this RX 480 variant. AMD’s Radeon RX 480 is based on the latest GCN 4.0 architecture which makes use of the FinFET architecture to deliver low power consumption, lesser voltage leak and better performance. In addition, AMD deploys a completely new architecture for Polaris chips with enhanced features listed below:

• Primitive Discard Accelerator
• Hardware Scheduler
• Instruction Pre-Fetch
• Improved Shader Efficiency
• Memory Compression

As a result, these GPUs can deliver up to 1.7 times the performance per watt increase thanks to the FinFET architecture while AMD exclusive technologies will help drive this efficiency up to 2.8 times which is thoroughly impressive. In addition to the foundation of AMD’s current generation GCN architecture, 4th generation GCN introduces new features. And one of them is primitive discard acceleration, which in no certain terms is AMD’s way of revealing that its upcoming GPUs will add support for additional key DirectX12 features such as Conservative Rasterization.

Additionally, AMD Radeon RX 480 is also capable of delivering up to 5.5 TFLOPs of compute performance which is extremely impressive considering the Radeon R9 390X delivers 400 GFLOPs more while consuming much more power (275W for the R9 390X vs 150W for the RX 480). While the graphics is available in the 8GB GDDR5 variant, it is also available in the 4GB GDDR5 model.

The 8GB frame buffer will allow great gaming experience on the 1440p resolution, and the memory clock of the GPU is running at 8GHz, which brings us to a grand total of 256 GB/s memory bandwidth. What did you think of the custom cooler presented by HIS?

AMD Polaris GCN 4.0 GPU Lineup:

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