HIS HD5870 Turbo review

Details
Price: £349.99
Verdict:
A big chunk of change to be spent here, but still reasonable value for
hardcore PC gamers that simply must have DX11 now. 7/10
Tech Specs:
GPU: Cypress PRO @875MHz
Stream Processors: 1600
Memory: 1GB GDDR5
Memory Frequency: 4900MHz (effective)
Connectivity: 2x Dual Link DVI, HDMI, Display Port
Bundle: Modern Warfare 2 voucher, DVI to VGA adapter,
Crossfire bridge, Eyefinity compatibility, 2x molex to 6-pin PCI-E
adapters, driver & manual
The last 5000-series graphics card we reviewed was Club 3D’s
5850, another factory overclocked edition that
cranked out a few MHz more for no extra cost. This is the bigger brother
to that middle-of-the-range, DX11 gaming card, put together by HIS and
also overclocked by the manufacturer for more bang-per-buck. It runs
alongside a range of 5000-series Radeon cards that have been overclocked
to compete directly with the release of NVidia Fermi cards, the next
generation of the CUDA architecture that is the 470 and 480.
On paper the stats are impressive: the HD5870 with its 40nm GPU core
offers an 875MHz Core and 4.9GHz memory clock compared to its nearest
competitor, NVIDIA GTX285, which ambles behind with 648MHz and 2,484MHz
respectively, though its shader clock does trump the 5870 at 1,476MHz
compared to 875MHz. There are other clear compromises that ATi has made
in creating its new DirectX 11 range, including half the memory
interface of its NVidia contemporary but a much bigger pixel fillrate.
Generally speaking, ATi has taken the foundation of the old RV770 – HD
4870 technology – and doubled everything for the RV870 core.
In practice this means it tears equivalent competitor cards apart in
Far Cry 2 – including that monster of NVidia’s DX10 generation, the
295GTX. It scores frame rates in the high seventies and low eighties at
1680×1050 with 0x and 4x anti-aliasing, compared to the fifties and
sixties the 285GTX and 295GTX scores. But being a Radeon optimised
title, Far Cry 2 was a foregone conclusion, and at high resolutions
(2560×1600) the 295GTX catches it up. On the flip side, the HD 5870’s
performance isn’t such a run-away at 61FPS/1680×1050/0x AA in Crysis.
It’s interesting to see too that the dual-GPU 4870X2 is comparable to HD
5870 at typical 24-inch resolutions and lower, only pulling away at
2560×1600 where the double-core sandwich comes into its own.
Side-by-side with the 5850 though, the extra value for money that the
HIS HD5870 Turbo offers is welcome, and if you’re running the latest
games on upwards of 24-inch resolutions at high visual fidelity, the
25MHz GPU boost and 100MHz to the memory affords a few extra frames per
second. Which in the long-term, could make the difference in raising
your game past the critical 30FPS threshold. Price is an issue and
there’s a hefty premium to be paid for this high-end DX11 card, but when
you compare it to the competition, it’s pretty good value.