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.