At first we would like to thank HIS for offering a sample of their R7 360 GREEN iCooler OC 2GB Video Card for testing and reviewing.

 

 

About HIS:

 

“HIS - Hightech Information System Limited is an internationally acclaimed graphics cards company. Time and time again, HIS were compared and tested by hundreds of worldly renowned critics. The results are phenomena, HIS have proven to offer far superior, cooler, quieter, and faster graphic cards than any other leading rivals. Up to the fourth quarter of 2011, HIS has won over 1600 awards with AMD graphic solution from major media worldwide. HIS is being recognized by providing performance leading and award-wining products: IceQ, IceQ X and Turbo Edition.

HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality PC products in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to "Glorifying God". Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors.

Headquartered in Hong Kong, and with sales offices and distribution networks in Europe, Middle East, North and South America, Asia Pacific Regions; our worldwide customers benefits from efficient and localized services. ISO Certified, HIS's manufacturing facility in China is managed by a team of professionals with expertise in quality control and production planning. Working with world-class clients, HIS has been consistently meeting high quality standards and fulfilled volume order in short lead-time.

HIS is proud to be AMD's Authorized 1st Tier AIB Partner, Certified Partner and Launching Partner. Long term and favorable relationship with AMD, enable HIS to work closely with AMD to promote the HIS AMD Graphics Board; and to strive for best value on the marketing and sales of HIS AMD Product Line.

In Sept 2003, HIS incorporated the state-of-the art Supreme Cooling Technology in the award winning HIS 9800Pro IceQ, which caught the attention of worldwide media. Since then, HIS IceQ series and the latest IceQ X series has been the limelight in the market for its outstanding performance and features over the other rivals.

Today, HIS continues its avid commitment to quality product and service. HIS is certain to be Your Choice of Graphics Board Supplier.”

Product Features:

 

Runs Overclocked Performance without the need of any 6-pin power socket

 

Super Low TDP (Thermal Design Power) : 50W

 

Lower Power consumption & thus generate less heat

 

GPU temperature dropped by 8 to 10 degree Celsius

 

HIS cards are engineered with the highest standards of safety, preventing any potential damages. Full Solid State Capacitors do ensure the best power quality and enhance the cards’ stability in different high-load situations.

 

The iCooler solution from HIS makes it extremely quiet so the noise level is less than 28 dB.

 

Product Specifications:

 

 

Guess you remember the HIS R7 360 iCooler card we have reviewed last September, which did come with a proprietary cooling design from the manufacturer, the GPU clock was boosted a bit by 20MHz, while the RAM was left at the same speeds as the stock OEM design. The card did also feature a refreshed Bonaire architecture (now baptized Tobago) with 768 stream processors, 48 texture units and 16 ROPS and the total memory buffer was 2GB. Since not a lot of new GPUs appeared from AMD in the most recent time frame, HIS started to innovate on new board designs, making their products more efficient than before and have also eliminated extra PCI-E power connectors. On this regard, the HIS R7 360 GREEN iCooler OC 2GB model has been born, but let’s take a closer look to see what we are dealing with; the box GREEN edition is shipped with features a similar design to the previous revision, but we must be careful and search for the “Green Edition” sticker in order to deal with the new model:

 

 

 

 

If we look on the box sides, we will be able to spot the box contents list and here HIS does also let us know that our system must be provided with a PCI-E x16 slot:

 

 

 

 

The product features are listed in more detail on the back side of the box, along with system requirements:

 

 

 

HIS seems to do a lot of changes to their packaging model nowadays, since the non-GREEN edition did feature a black box with a transparent plastic enclosure in which the board was held secure:

 

 

 

Besides the multi-language Quick Installation Guide, we will also get one disk with drivers but we recommend on always rolling with the latest Crimson build from the web:

 

 

 

The board is packed carefully inside a black plastic bubble bag:

 

 

 

On a first look we will get to see a similar cooler design which does feature an anti-dust cover, while the large 90mm fan is used for cooling the sunflower design heatsink. The specially designed fan blades are meant to increase the air pressure, while reducing the overall produced noise:

 

 

 

If you haven’t already noticed from the frontal shot, you will get to see better when looking at the back side of the PCB that it has the same color and texture with the one we have seen with their 380X model which gives the board a much more professional look; here we will be also able to see a small sticker with the product serial number and code name:

 

 

 

The NCP81022 controller supports I2C for monitoring and was designed to handle the dynamic clock algorithm of the Tobago GPU:

 

 

 

On the I/O, the board does offer us one HDMI port, one DisplayPort and two DVIs:

 

 

 

HIS did also place a GREEN Edition sticker on the cooler shroud, but we guess that if they would have placed it on the opposite side, the sticker would have been visible in our build while the system is powered on:

 

 

 

 

The cooling system can be easily dismantled by removing the four spring-loaded screws on the back:

 

 

 

A quick look at the PCB arrangement shows us the reworked GPU VRM on the left, the memory VRM on the top right side (this area was occupied by the PCI-E 6-pin connector on the previous revision), while the fan two-pin header has been migrated to the left:

 

 

 

 

While the non-GREEN model was sporting Hynix RAM, this one comes with ELPIDA W4032BABG-60-F memory chips which are specified to run at 1500MHz (6000MHz effective):

 

 

 

In the middle of the board we do spot the tiny Tobago GPU:

 

 

 

The cooling system was designed to only cool the GPU directly, but the arrangement of the heatsink fins do permit the cold air to blow on the rest of the PCB too:

 

 

 

As with the 380X, the nice curved edges of the PCB are back:

 

 

 

Test Setup

 

CPU: Intel I5 4690K Retail @ 4.6GHz

CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX

Motherboard: BIOSTAR Z97X Gaming

RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 4x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)

Video: Currently reviewed card

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB + OCZ Vertex 460

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

 

With the help of the GPU-Z utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on; this GREEN model does feature the same GPU clock as the previous revision, but the memory clocks have been lowered to 1500MHz:

 

 

To receive more in-depth information regarding the GPU, we have used the AIDA64 utility:

 

 

 

 

Temperature tests:

For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO64 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 4.0 at the 1920x1080 resolution for an additional 10 to 15 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 18.9 degrees Celsius:

 

 

Noise measurements

Regular noise measurements were not possible with this board because we did not have access to the RPM readings; however, the board features the exact same cooling system as the previous board.

 

3DMark 11

 

3DMark 11 is a DirectX 11 video card benchmark test for measuring your PC's gaming performance. 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of DirectX 11 features including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 consistently and reliably tests your PC's DirectX 11 performance under game-like loads.

 

 

3DMark 2013

 

3DMark includes everything you need to benchmark your hardware in one app. Whether you're gaming on a smart phone, tablet, notebook, laptop, desktop, or a high performance gaming PC, 3DMark includes a benchmark designed specifically for your type of device. And it's not just for Windows. You can compare your scores with Android and iOS devices too. It's the best 3DMark we've ever created.

 

 

Unigine Heaven 4.0

 

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system's potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

 

 

Hitman Absolution

 

Hitman: Absolution is a stealth video game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix. It is the fifth installment in the Hitman game series, and runs on IO Interactive's proprietary Glacier 2 game engine.

 

 

DIRT: Rally V0.5

 

Dirt Rally is a racing video game developed and published by Codemasters for Microsoft Windows. An early access version of the game was released on 27 April 2015, via digital distribution service Steam.

 

 

Sleeping Dogs

 

Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games and Square Enix London. It was published by Square Enix and Bandai Namco Games for Microsoft Windows and the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles.

 

 

Tomb Raider

 

Tomb Raider is a media franchise that began as a video game series and includes comic books, novels, theme park rides, and movies, centering around the adventures of the British archaeologist Lara Croft.

 

 

Sniper Elite III

 

Sniper Elite III is a tactical shooter video game developed by Rebellion Developments and published by 505 Games for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

 

 

Metro Last Light

 

Metro: Last Light is a single-player post-apocalyptic-themed first-person shooter video game with stealth and survival horror elements, developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver.

 

 

Bioshock Infinite

 

BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games.

 

 

Crysis 2

 

Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek, published by Electronic Arts and released in North America, Australia and Europe in March 2011 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

 

 

Batman Arhkam Origins

 

Batman: Arkham Origins is a 2013 action-adventure video game developed by Warner Bros. Games Montréal and released by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for Microsoft Windows and the PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 video game consoles.

 

 

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

 

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is an open world action-adventure video game set within Tolkien's legendarium, developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

 

 

Alien: Isolation

 

Alien: Isolation is a first-person survival horror stealth video game developed by The Creative Assembly and published by Sega.

 

 

GRID Autosport

 

Grid Autosport is a racing video game released by Codemasters for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 24 June 2014 in North America and 27 June 2014 in Europe.

 

 

HIS efforts are to be appreciated since they have succeeded to build a new design of the R7 360 video card which now does not need an extra PCI-E 6-pin power connector. In full load, the card will consume between 47 and 48W so within range of the value HIS did report of about 50W and we can see again their iCooler implementation featuring one sunflower-design heatsink, which is cooled by a 90mm silent fan. Regarding overclocking, it was a very nice experience meaning that we have reached without a lot of effort the maximum clocks we did with the previous generation card.

 

But let’s describe a bit our overclocking experience with this card in more detail: considering that the memory clock on the HIS R7 360 iCooler OC was 1625MHz, the GREEN edition did arrive with only 1500MHz. Our initial thoughts were that this was made on purpose in order to fit the power envelope and function without that extra 6-pin PCI-E connector but oh boy, we couldn't have been so wrong! First we tried to raise the clocks to the exact same values as the previous card and it has proven itself very stable and this way we have also matched its performance:

 

 

 

The next logical step was to keep overclocking the card in small increments via Sapphire TriXX and see where this operation will get us. We have succeeded to raise the GPU clock from 1070MHz to 1275MHz, while the RAM speed was increased from 1500MHz to 1710MHz so we have obtained a healthy performance improvement by testing stability and score in 3DMark 2011:

 

 

 

This card is definitely more recommended than the previous revision, but it will still remain in the low-end segment so it can be used with MOBA, strategy games which do not require a lot of GPU resources and up to 1080P in terms of resolution.

 

The card can be found online for about 110 Euros.

 

HIS R7 360 GREEN iCooler OC 2GB Video Card is Recommended for:

 

 

We would like to thank again to HIS for making this review possible!