Legit Video Card Reviews

HIS Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Performance Review

Manufacturer: HIS
Product: HIS Radeon HD5870 H587F1GDG
Date: Thu, Jan 21, 2010 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Dan Stoltz -
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A Closer Look

Taking the heat sink off is a simple task with the appropriate tools. The entire assembly comes apart with eighteen screws. Eleven on the back plate, four at the four sides of the RV870 chip and three by the Display ports.

HIS Radeon HD5870

You can see the copper contact point of the heat sink and the thermal tape used to make contact on all the other points that need to be cooled.  Another six screws and you can pull the front shroud off and reveal the rest of the heat sink.

HIS Radeon HD5870

In order to keep the HD5870 cool it HIS Utilizes the reference cooler. The reference cooler uses four heat pipes that run through the aluminum fins and air is fed through the heat sink assembly via a blower at the back of the card.

HIS Radeon HD5870

Above is the heart of the HIS Radeon HD5870.  The RV870 also called the cypress core is the most advanced graphics core to date.  Built on 40nm technology it possesses 2.15 billion transistors which is 2.25x the amount of transistors found on the HD4870.

4870_versus_5870

As you can see in the above slide the technology in the HD5870 is a huge leap from the HD4870. Despite the huge differences in technology and presumably performance, the HD5870 utilizes only 28 more watts under full load than its predecessor(according to AMD).

HIS Radeon HD5870

The front of the card is also home to the eight memory ic's. The memory chips are manufactured by Samsung and have a rated speed of 1250MHz though come set at 1200MHz.  If you look toward's the right side of the card you can see a label with CPL2-4.  I was curious what that was, so after a little digging I discovered that it is the 4 phase power inductor.

Model Name HIS HD 5870 (DirectX 11 / Eyefinity / Full HD 1080p) Native HDMI 1GB (256bit) GDDR5 Dual DL-DVI / Display Port / HDMI (HDCP) PCIe (RoHS) (DiRT-2)
Chipset Radeon HD 5870 PCIe Series
ASIC Radeon HD 5870 GPU
Pixel Pipelines 1600 stream processing units* (Unified)
Vertex Engines 1600 stream processing units* (Unified)
Manu. Process (Micron) 40nm
Transistor
Memory Size (MB) 1024
Memory Type GDDR5
RAMDAC (MHz) 400
Engine CLK (MHz) 850
Memory CLK (Gbps) 4.8Gbps
Memory Interface (bit) 256
Max. Resolution 3x 2560*1600 (Dual dual-link)
Bus Interface PCI Express x16
Display Port
Yes
HDMI Yes
DVI Yes
2nd DVI Yes

Read on to see what type of toys come with the HIS Radeon HD5870

Next Page - Retail Box and Bundle


Review Index
Page 1 - The HIS Radeon HD 5870
Page 2 - A Closer Look
Page 3 - Retail Box and Bundle
Page 4 - The Test System
Page 5 - Batman Arkham Asylum
Page 6 - Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
Page 7 - Resident Evil 5
Page 8 - DiRT 2
Page 9 - FurMark 1.70
Page 10 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 11 - Unigine 'Heaven' DX11
Page 12 - Temperature Testing
Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 14 - Overclocking the HIS Radeon HD5870
Page 15 - Final Thoughts and Conclusion