The HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo is a well designed 5 series card and performed slightly better than the reference design throughout our testing. The iCooler design is a bit of a mixed bag, it cools much more efficiently than the reference design, but there is a noise penalty to be paid … which while only slight, is still noticeable.
If we had a complaint we would actually say that HIS have been too conservative with their clock settings. We noticed no additional noise from manually overclocking the card, and while not every board will hit the heights we achieved, we feel clocks of 925mhz on the core and 1275mhz on the ram would be safe.
In regards to pricing the HIS model is only £20 more than a reference design card in the UK right now which makes it an extremely viable purchase, especially when you factor in the free Modern Warfare 2 game.
Everything considered we can really recommend the HIS card, it is well priced, runs cool and the bundle is impressive. If they had overclocked it higher out of the box and managed to get the noise down a little it would have walked away with our top score. As it stands, it is still worth buying.
KitGuru says: This card is a good choice, just be sure to overclock the nuts off it.
Discuss in our forum over here or just leave a quick comment below.
HD5870 is a great card and I like the look of this one. cooler is a bit ugly I think but its nice to see improved/higher fan speeds for cooler temps.
I never really notice fan noise, unless its wild helicopter style noise. This looks like a good buy. I never see them in america tho, not in stores anyway
Sapphire model is better but it costs more. which I would say would be pretty obvious
Well I like being proved wrong, I had assumed HIS was a POS, but this review has certainly changed my view.
mega OC on that. weird they only overclock it a little out of the factory. its hardly ‘turbo’ more ‘shoved a little’
Glad to see you mentioning the hardly overclocked speeds. I dont know why they launch these as TURBO editions when its hardly even overclocked in the least, which is shown on the graphs. So much headroom and I think a small portion of the audience will even know how much they can get out of it. ID have gave it 3 out of 5 just for that point. TURBO should be TURBO.
Well I was expecting good temps, but more noise over reference? surely thats not right
nice review, very thorough, thanks.
Excellent, I like that card a lot. I prefer cooler to quieter.
I would probably still opt for Sapphire, they just seem a better company
I would probably still opt for Sapphire, they just seem a better company
I just ordered one of these and got a bit of a bargain, 50 off retail price 🙂