Introduction

A few months ago 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 recently 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.

Now we are seeing more and more custom designed HD 5850 cards that use both a non-reference cooler and a non-reference PCB design. While this allows for considerable production optimizations and reduction in manufacturing cost it also introduces the risk that the product might not work as optimally as intended by AMD.

HIS has now released a HD 5850 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 been increased by 40 MHz core and 125 MHz memory, not a huge change but it can certainly add a few percent performance to the card. 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.