The HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo is a rock solid no-frills HD 6850 card. It comes with higher clocks out the box, which are in the middle of typical HD 6850 out of the box overclocks. This can help the card gain a 6% performance advantage, averaged over the games we tested. The new IceQ X heatsink by HIS seems to do its job well and reaches very low temperatures. Unfortunately these temperatures come at the price of fan noise which seems to be higher than necessary in idle. Under load the card is a bit quieter than the AMD reference design, but not by much. Given the low temperatures I see some good potential for manually quietening down the fan via software or BIOS mod, to have a low-noise solution.
Overclocking on our card worked well, the clock speeds we saw were in the typical range for a HD 6850 card. Most HD 6850 cards are great clockers and you can easily add another extra 10-12% gaming performance with some overclocking. If you are willing to go even further, the CHiL voltage regulator used by HIS offers full voltage control, we tested up to 1.45 V, which yielded us a clock frequency above 1020 MHz - and temperatures were still in the low 80s.
Overall the HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo is a good alternative to any HD 6850 reference card, but it fails to have any unique properties that really make it stand out of the crowd. If the price is right: buy!