The HIS HD 4870 IceQ4+ Turbo is a solid choice for everybody looking for something that goes beyond HD 4870 reference design. The addition of 512 MB GDDR5 for a total of one gig certainly helps in recent games at higher resolutions. Even though it is fairly small, the overclock out of the box is also a nice addition. Should you need more performance you can easily overclock the card well beyond 800 MHz - our sample managed 835 MHz which is quite close to the clocks of the HD 4890 reference (850 MHz).
There is only one major issue that I can complain about with this card and that is the fan noise. Due to what seems a bug in the fan control implementation in the BIOS, the card will be extremely noisy under load. Until HIS issues a BIOS fix you should use manual fan control to have a quiet gaming experience. I ran a few quick tests with a custom fan profile and could get the card to run at noise levels that I consider very quiet - even under full load.
With a price of arund $260 the card is not cheap, especially not when considering all the recent AMD price drops on the HD 4870. The cheapest 512 MB HD 4870 costs around $170 nowadays, making it a tough choice to spend extra money on more expensive cards.