HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo 1GB
Apr 17th, 2010 | By JaredAs I noted before you will want to be sure you have the room for the iCooler V Turbo card which shouldn’t be an issue in any full tower case but any mid-tower’s will need to double check.
After getting the card installed it was time to get down to some overclocking. Now we know the HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo comes overclocked from the factory, but who doesn’t like a little more? The first thing to do is grab MSI’s Afterburner program since ATI’s Overdrive utility tops out at 900MHz core and 1300MHz memory.
After a good bit of testing I was able to raise the core to a stable 910MHz and got the memory up to a stable 1320MHz without increasing the voltage. This is up from the factory overclocked settings of 875MHz core and 1225MHz memory.
During my overclocking adventures I manually turned the fan up to 100% to ensure temperatures weren’t preventing the maximum overclock. At 100% the fan is quite loud and unless you have some good noise cancelling headphones you wouldn’t want to run at this setting though it does keep the temps down in the 50C range. However to measure temperatures I returned the fan to the auto setting. The Furmark stability test was used to achieve load temperatures.
Once I set the fan setting back to auto, maximum temps under load only increased by 2 degrees over the factory overclocked settings. Idle temperatures increased but that is only because with the overclocked settings under 2D the card is not downclocked. This can easily be achieved using the same utility by setting up a second profile and assigning it to 2D settings.
Now that we have seen how far we can push the HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo 1Gb card, we are going to throw it through some benchmarks. Below are the system specifications that will be used for testing.
Control:
CPU: Intel E8400 @ 4GHz w/ Noctua NH-D14
MB: Biostar TPower I45
RAM: G.Skill PI Black PC6400
PSU: Ultra X3 1000W
HD: WD 250GB SATA
DVD-Rom: Lite-On 18x DVD Burner – SATA
OS: Microsoft Windows 7
Ambient Temperature: 22-24C
GPUs:
HIS HD 5870 1GB (Catalyst 10.2)
XFX HD 4890 1GB (Catalyst 10.2)
All benchmarks were run a minimum of three times with scores being the average of those three runs.