The HIS HD 5850 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 40 MHz on the core and 125 MHz on the memory. This increase results on a performance improvement of about 5% compared to the reference design HD 5850. While it will not result in a difference like night and day, it is still enough to warrant an "overclocked" edition name in my opinion. If you are willing to do some manual work though, you can easily overclock the card some more, to get close to HD 5870 performance. Unfortunately this isn't possible using Catalyst Control Center alone, since the CCC Overdrive limits are set to 775/1150 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 little bit too expensive. Its current price point is $345 minus $20 that's $325. We have seen custom designed, overclocked HD 5870 cards in the $310 range in recent days, so there is still another $10 to go in pricing.