Final Words & Conclusion
The Verdict
It is so good to see HIS applying another cooling solution other than the ICEQ series we have seen and tested so many times. As such the iCooler V Turbo edition Radeon HD 5870 is a fantastic card to own and it certainly has great looks.
I do have one reservation though and that's the cooler noise level. I have not verified this with HIS just yet, but in IDLE (desktop mode) the fan was fixed at 54% RPM, making the product a little too noisy for that environment and my taste. When we manually set it at 40% the cooling was still very sufficient yet completely silent. But overall as it is right now it's definitely not the most silent solution out there.
Update April 11, 2010 - HIS issued a new BIOS based on our recommendations. IDLE temperatures will now be roughly 40~45 Degrees C, but the IDLE noise level went down significantly to 38 DBa.The peak DBa level however remains the same at roughly 44 DBa under full GPU stress.
The flipside of the coin is that the cooler does performs really well. I mean the RV870 GPU simply requires a very decent cooler and the iCooler definitely delivers as it easily shaves off another 10 Degrees C over the reference cooler.
HIS will deliver a lot of Radeon HD 5870 SKUs on the market. The regular version can be bought, but you can also purchase the iCooler. And then you can opt the version with or without the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 bundle. Then two more SKUs with the same combo options, the R5870 iCooler V Turbo edition that we tested. And this R5870 iCooler V Turbo edition is impressive.
Though we know that ATI is really prohibiting its partners from overclocking excessively, HIS will give you a little bump in performance with the help of another 25 MHz on the graphics core and another 100 MHz (effective) on the memory. Nonetheless when you start to overclock yourself then things tent to get really interesting. We could overclock up-to roughly 950 MHz without any issues and the memory we boosted over 5400 MHz (effective), and all in all that's just a good overclock especially when you consider that we did not use any voltage tweaks. Heck that's another 10% extra performance.
The package is good, cooler could be more silent, optionaly you get a great bundle for not a lot of money extra and of course you receive the to-date fastest single GPU based graphics card, the Radeon HD 5870. Even at default clocks the card is a beast, I mean we certainly can't complain playing COD Modern Warfare 2 at 2560x1200 with 4xAA and the very best image quality settings and still retrieve an average framerate of 90 FPS. The same for Anno 1404 (yeah I really like this title), if we take a more common resolution then at 1920x1200 we see the card push out an average framerate of 74 FPS with 4xAA enabled. It's a fantastic little GPU alright.
Long story short, after our numerous reviews you guys know the Radeon HD 5870 for what it is and does, HIS is bringing it to the next level with their iCooler V Turbo edition and we like it very much. As such we can definitely recommend the card. We do hope to see an updated BIOS from HIS though, with slightly lower RPM values for IDLE situations as I am truly anal when it comes to noise levels. But other then that, this just is an interesting product.
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