Far Cry 2

Another fav of mine.  Traipsing through the African jungle with tall grass swaying and burning at times in the wind is taxing on any card.  When you add in the sheer number of individuals blades of grass for instance and the physics involved, Far Cry 2 can punish any system set at high levels.  But if you're going to be a bear, be a Grisly!

Card	5870 Turbo	5870	5850 Turbo	5850	5830 Turbo	5830	5770 Turbo
Min FPS	32	26	27	24	13	16	14
Max FPS	81	74	84	72	41	39	40
Avg FPS	53	51	47	44	30	30	29

Turning the resolution down below 1600 x 1200 allowed the HD 5830 and HD 5770 to keep their frame rates up to be more fluid.  These settings were so demanding that you really need a high end card to use and enjoy these settings at higher resolutions.  You can see where the 5770 and 5830 actually dropped well below the magic 30 frames per second mark a few times.  30 fps is important because your eye can't track anything beyond 30 frames per second.  It merely perceives things above that level as fluid motion.  Dip below and your eyes definitely notice.

Again, we see the 5850 and 5870 pull ahead.  With HIS's factory overclock, even more so.  Nice.

A number of you all like us to throw in the Futuremark canned benchmarks which do have their place.  Below is Futuremark's Vantage that looks at the overall system performance and GPU performance.

	3DMark Score	GPU Score	CPU Score
HIS HD 5870 Turbo	20290	19148	24709
HIS HD 5850 Turbo	17415	15862	24658
HIS HD 5830 Turbo	13918	12176	24378
HIS HD 5770 Turbo	11779	10029	24723

Conclusion

Performance isn't all about raw speed.  Each of the HIS cards has a variable rate cooling fan that spins up based on the temperature detected by an internal diode.  We tested these cards for far more than three minute segments at times.  Typically each gets at least one half hour frag run to see how hot the card will get.  This not only allows us to look at cooling efficiency but how loud the fan gets as it increases its speed.  We saw no "hot" cards and even in the midst of some extended gaming the fans on all four cards never when above a whisper when under load.  Under normal conditions there were flat silent.

Cooler, Faster, Quieter has been HIS's catch phrase.  As we have seen over a number of years now with HIS, they deliver each.  Taking performance oriented fast cards and making them faster.  Trashing reference design cooling for state of the art high performance smart cooling assemblies that allow superior cooling but do so smarter and quieter.  Each of these cards beckons to a particular audience and all four can be called winners.  As I've said before, the HD 5850 card is a great performance component that is made even better with HIS's iCooler V and Turbo treatment.  Remember the HIS HD 5850 Turbo outperformed a reference speed HD 5870.  That says a lot of the card and the company.  Our thanks to HIS for supporting this review and for putting out some great products across a spectrum of price points for any user.  The cards that really shine the most are the HIS HD 5850 Turbo and the HIS HD 5770 IceQ5 Turbo.  Both cards go beyond our OC Cafe Recommended rating to receive our Editor's Choice Award. 

BACK               HOME

Pg. 1 - Introduction
Pg. 2 - HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo
Pg. 3 - HIS HD 5850 iCooler V Turbo
Pg. 4 - HIS HD 5830 iCooler V Turbo
Pg. 5 - HIS HD 5770 IceQ5 Turbo
Pg. 6 - Benchmarking Results
Pg. 7 - Benchmarking Results / Conclusion