The HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo is a rock solid card that can play every game you throw at it, at resolutions up to 1920x1200, with highest details settings, and some anti-aliasing eyecandy. It offers all the latest and greatest features of AMD's Radeon HD 5800 Series, which are EyeFinity, DirectX 11, improved HDMI audio, just to name a few. In addition to what the reference design offers, HIS has bumped the clock speeds of their card by 25 MHz on the core and memory. 25 MHz doesn't sound like much, and it isn't. In our testing we saw a performance increase of 1-2%, depending on the resolution, something that is not significant, no matter how you look at it. If you are willing to do some manual work though, you can easily overclock the card in the 950+ MHz range with over 1350 MHz on the memory. Unfortunately this isn't possible using Catalyst Control Center alone, since the CCC Overdrive limits are set to 900/1300 MHz. HIS' iCooler V cooling solution offers very low temperature levels, but in return for these low temperatures the fan noise is higher than on the reference design.
I also would like to applaud HIS for their bundled game choice. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is among the best titles of the recent months, and offers without doubt one of the most immersive single player experiences of all the time. If you already played the game, you could sell the included key code on eBay for around 20 bucks which will help offset the price of the card - or give it away to a friend to make him smile. Even considering the $20 value of the game, the card feels still a bit too expensive. It's current price point is $450 minus $20 that's $430. We have seen custom designed, overclocked HD 5870 cards in the $400-$410 range in recent days, so there is still another $20 to go in pricing.