HIS 5870 V iCooler Turbo review - Introduction

HIS R5870 V iCooler Turbo - popping some pepper on the GPU

Oh man .. one wonders how it is possible to see so many overlcocked and special edition Radeon HD 5870 cards so close to NVIDIA's Fermi launch. Hey everybody and welcome to yet another ATI series 5000 review.

Today a product based on the oh so popular Radeon HD 5870 that comes with customized PCB and a more extreme cooler. Yes, the quest for more MHz has started and as such HIS has introduced a more fashionable version compared to the reference design.

The HIS Radeon HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo edition features a custom-designed cooler that's improved from the iCooler IV HIS, you can perhaps remember they used one on some graphics cards (last generation Radeon HD 4890). The card itself then, while the non-Turbo variants use reference AMD clock speeds of 850 MHz core and 1200 MHz memory, the Turbo model we test today, ups that number to 875 MHz and 1225 MHz respectively, brings a little more kapoooow to the product. The HIS R5870 V iCooler Turbo features 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, and great monitor connectivity. You will have two DVI-D, and one HDMI and DisplayPort connector at your disposal. As added bonus HIS released a special SKU that comes with a full copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as well.

See, we'd almost forget that this obviously is a regular 5870 as well and thus comes DX11 ready and can take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions.  Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is of course Eyefinity, the ability to connect one to six monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredible wide monitor resolution to play games in. ATI has changed the rules as the Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 stream processors (shader processors). ATI literally doubled up everything inside that GPU and as such we spot a GPU die with 2.15 billion transistors. That's 2150 million transistors you guys. In comparison, the Radeon HD 4890 has 956 million. Already available, the regular HIS HD 5870 iCooler V is priced at 339 Euro, whereas the HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo carries a price of 359 Euro. If you want the Call of Duty MW 2 bundle, I think the price is only a tenner more which would mean great value.

Have a peek at the coolness in the photo below .. and then let's startup a nice lengthy review to see if the HIS R5870 V iCooler Turbo has got what it takes to be among the top ranking Radeon HD 5870 cards on the market.