Introduction

Last year AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Up to now all cards available from all manufacturers were reference design cards which means they were all made to the same specifications, using the same components and then a sticker was added on the cooler depending on the AIB.

HIS has now released a HD 5870 that is completely custom designed. It uses their iCooler V heatsink together with a customized PCB design that allows more cost effective production. The clock speeds have received a small bump with 25 MHz, which is probably not going to make much of a difference in benchmarks. A clear highlight of this card is the included game bundle: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which is one of the recent AAA titles.

	GeForce GTX 285	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 5870	HIS HD 5870 iCoolerV Turbo	GeForce GTX 295	GeForce GTX 480
Shader units	240	1440	1600	1600	2x 240	480
ROPs	32	32	32	32	2x 28	48
GPU	GT200b	Cypress	Cypress	Cypress	2x GT200b	GF100
Transistors	1400M	2154M	2154M	2154M	2x 1400M	3200M
Memory Size	1024 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB	2x 896 MB	1536 MB
Memory Bus Width	512 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	2x 448 bit	384 bit
Core Clock	648 MHz	725 MHz	850 MHz	875 MHz	576 MHz	700 MHz
Memory Clock	1242 MHz	1000 MHz	1200 MHz	1225 MHz	999 MHz	924 MHz
Price	$350	$310	$400	$450	$520	$499