HIS 5850 Turbo

We really like the iCooler that HIS uses on some of it's high end graphics cards, so we were eager to see how effective it is on this popular high end GPU.

Specifications

The box for the HIS 5850 Turbo is the new 'upright' style that HIS have adopted of late and like the 5830 Turbo we reviewed a couple of weeks ago, sports a Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 theme on the front. The rear provides plenty of information so you know exactly what you're getting. Inside you'll find a gray cardboard box, and inside that is the extra contents sitting in a cardboard tray above the card itself; all the packaging is recyclable.

Included with the HIS 5850 Turbo is a DVI to VGA adapter, two 2x 4 pin Molex to 6 pin PCIe power adapters, a Crossfire bridge connector, a Voucher with a key to claim your copy of CoD:MW2 via Steam and a disk folder which contains the Software CD, an all paper manual and a HIS Power Up case badge.

The card itself is quite large and sports the excellent HIS iCooler V cooling setup. The cooler uses a gloss black shroud over a heat-pipe cooler, with a blue finned fan to supply cool air. The fan draws air in and it's exhausted at the IO plate of the card. At the opposite end of the cooler there are slanted grills/vents and the entire shroud is covered in a Modern Warfare 2 sticker.

Turning the card over we can see that the iCooler is secured nicely with a bracket around the GPU, and that HIS have used their usual blue colored PCB.

The IO plate takes up two slots with an exhaust grill and DVI connection across the top slot, and a DisplayPort, HDMI and second DVI port on the bottom slot.

Testing

Test Setup: Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 @ 3.20GHz, 4GB of OCZ PC2-6400 Ram @ 960MHz, Asus Blitz Formula, Silicon Power M10 32GB + WD640AAKS, Asetek Waterchill Watercooling, Hyper Type M 730w PSU. All latest drivers as of March 2010 and the OS is Windows 7 64bit.

For comparison, we are testing against a default clocked 5850 card.

Software

Left 4 Dead 2 - Recording a custom demo on the Dead Center, Hotel level (inside in the inferno), we used FRAPS to record frame rates as we played back the demo on all cards at same settings.

Assassin's Creed 2 – The second of our DirectX 9 games, we tested by climbing a tower repeatedly in the Venice, San Polo – Rialto Bridge area and taking a leap of faith to the hay below. FRAPS was used to record frame-rates and the cards were set to the highest possible for each card.

Batman Arkham Asylum – We used a combination of the in game benchmark and FRAPS to gather our numbers for this game. All cards were set to the highest possible settings for that card.

Crysis Warhead – We used the Framebuffer benchmark tool to run through the Ambush demo and recorded the results with FRAPS. Settings for each card were set to highest possible for that card.

Colin McRae's DiRT2 - DiRT2 has some very good looking visuals and provides us with our first DirectX 11 test. We used FRAPS with the games inbuilt benchmark to test a quick run around a London track.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat Benchmark – Our second DX11 test uses a combination of Fraps and the Ray portion of the benchmark. Cards were set to highest possible for each card.

Devil May Cry 4 Benchmark - DMC4's benchmark provides a nice way of testing that anyone can do. Results are all from the benchmark itself, and include average frame rates as well as 4 graphs for each level tested. Settings for all cards were the same.