HIS Radeon 5850 iCooler V Turbo review

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Setup | Noise | Power consumption | Heat levels

Hardware installation

Installation of the product is really easy. Once the card is installed and seated into the PC we now connect the two 6-pin power connectors to the graphics card. 

Hook up your monitor and you can now power on your PC, boot into Windows, install the latest ATI Catalyst driver and after a reboot all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed.

HIS Radeon 5850 iCooler Turbo

Energy consumption

We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is slightly above reference, nothing extraordinary though.

The methodology is simple: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. After we have run all our tests and benchmarks, we look at the recorded maximum peak; and that's the bulls-eye you need to observe as the power peak is extremely important. Bear in mind that you are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC. 

Our test system is a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58 based and overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results).

I'd say on average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to higher CPU clock settings, water-cooling, additional cold cathode lights etc.

Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is a little higher than your average system.

Single GPU 5850

  • System in IDLE = 157 Watts
  • System with GPU in FULL Stress = 334 Watts
  • Difference (GPU load) = 184 Watt (official reference TDP = 170W)

The monitoring device is reporting a maximum system wattage peak at roughly 334 Watts and for a PC with this setup, this is simply low and certainly remains within acceptable levels.

The IDLE wattage is very okay as the graphics card is clocking down massively, resulting in an all time low power consumption (for our test PC). We'll show you that in a graph in a minute.

 

So here's our power supply recommendation:

Radeon HD 5850

  • On your average system the card requires you to have a 500 Watt power supply unit at minimum (we recommend 550W) if you use it in a high-end system.

Radeon HD 5850 2-way CrossfireX

  • A second card requires you to add another 180 Watts. You need a 700+ Watt power supply unit if you use it in a high-end system (800 recommended).

For each card that you add, just add another 200 Watts and 10A on the 12V rails as a safety margin.

There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:

  • bad 3D performance
  • crashing games
  • spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the  PC
  • freezing during gameplay
  • PSU overload can cause it to break down

The graphics card cooler performance examined

Let's have a look at the temperatures this custom cooler offers.

HIS Radeon 5850 iCooler Turbo

We now fire off a hefty shader application at the GPU and start monitoring temperature behavior as it would be when you are gaming intensely and continuously. We literally stress the GPU 100% here as you can see in the graph. 

We measured at a room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius. Now we report at two stages the GPU(s), in IDLE and under stress. Here's what we get returned:

Card setting TEMP IDLE C TEMP FULL C
HIS R5850 iCooler V Turbo 35 61

As you can see we get good temperatures returned, quite lower compared to the reference cooler. When the PC has nothing to do, the card is clocked down to 157 MHz, we see a temperature of give or take 35 degrees C.

A couple of reference boards compared to the card tested today. When we completely stress out the GPU 100% for a while, temperatures rise towards roughly 61 degrees C, that's just really good. But is the cooler very loud then?

Noise Levels coming from the graphics card

When graphics cards produce a lot of heat, usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.

The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBA level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, where as frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.

How we measure. We measure in real-world conditions. We close the PC chassis and point our DBa gun it the chassis from a 75cm distance (you typically are 75~100cm away from your PC.

TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS
Jet takeoff (200 feet) 120 dBA  
Construction Site 110 dBA  Intolerable
Shout (5 feet) 100 dBA  
Heavy truck (50 feet)  90 dBA  Very noisy
Urban street  80 dBA  
Automobile interior  70 dBA  Noisy
Normal conversation (3 feet)  60 dBA  
Office, classroom  50 dBA  Moderate
Living room  40 dBA  
Bedroom at night  30 dBA  Quiet
Broadcast studio  20 dBA  
Rustling leaves  10 dBA  Barely audible

The idle noise levels coming from the card are okay, in idle you will hear the card as we measured at only 37 dbA, which is right below the threshold of noise from the PC itself. You will not hear it.

Once the GPU starts to heat up the fan RPM will go up as well and the card does become a little louder. We measure roughly 43 dBA  based on heavy GPU stress. As such we can only conclude that the iCooler cooling is very silent when in idle, and during hefty gaming you can heat it -- but at very acceptable noise levels

HIS 5870 iCooler V Turbo

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