Final Words & Conclusion
The Verdict,
Okay I must acknowledge, I am awed. Opposed to the previous iCooler review we posted, HIS made BIOS changes based on our recommendations. And not to flatter ourselves, or to pat ourselves on the back, the new BIOS works out really great. We see grand baseline performance thanks to the standard overclock, we also see really good temperatures and despite it all, the Cooler remains at really acceptable noise levels during gaming and when idling in desktop mode, you will not even hear it. Just the way we like it.
That said, this makes the HIS Radeon 5850 iCooler V Turbo one of the best R5850 cards currently available on the market. All factors are now right, the cooling performance remains great and that ensures a good overclock as well. We ended at roughly 875 on the graphics base core, that's 150 MHz over the reference R5850 clock frequency. With the standard overclock the product all by itself is already closing in real fast at the R5870, yet it remains a good chunk cheaper.
See the R5850 cards are my personal favorite in the high-end range. They are affordable and offer mucho bang for buck, much like the 5770 in the mid-range series. The HIS Radeon 5850 iCooler V Turbo will sell at roughly 319 USD and that's just a fair price, optionally you can opt the version with a Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 coupon for Steam, which I think costs a tenner or fifteen bucks more. Your choice ... but should you not yet have the game, that's just an awesome deal for an truly awesome game.
So for 319 USD you can purchase a really nice DX11 ready graphics card that is well balanced out price and performance wise. The card is definitely powerful enough to keep the GeForce GTX 470 behind it or at the very least real close. Meanwhile having the better thermal and power consumption package. Here this faster clocked R5850 just makes more sense.
With some DX11 games popping up on the radar where hefty shaders are utilized and heck, hardware tessellation is being used you will start seeing a nice difference. Fact is, if you purchase a card like the one shown today, you'll know for sure that it's 100% DX11 compatible.
Stability wise we have had no issues whatsoever, and with all the connectors you can also get your groove on and setup three monitors in Eyefinity 3 mode.
So yeah, I have nothing negative to report here, the iCooler version of the HIS Radeon HD 5850 is a little gem. if you can find it, then get it as we can recommend it massively over say Sapphire's products. You will simply not regret it. We hand it out very occasionally, but this product deserves Guru3D's best hardware award for a job extremely well done.
- Leave/read feedback on this product
- Sign up to receive a notice when we publish a new article
- Or go back to Guru3D's front page
