HIS HD 5830 iCooler V Turbo Review

We have just spent the past week or so playing with the HIS 5830 and must say we have been pleasantly surprised. The HIS 5830 did a good job with pretty much everything we threw at it, even Crysis Warhead, but when we looked at the Lost Planet benchmark we could only get playable speeds with the DX 11 feature set turned down to low.

The iCooler V performs well, keeping the 5830 temperatures in check even when running Furmark.  The noise level of this cooler is technically louder than the AMD cooler but due to the larger fan size the frequency produced is not as high pitched as a reference cooler, its a decent trade off.  The one thing that would prevent me from considering it as  a potential purchase right now is the price of the GTX 460's.

AMD have pretty much run rampant for the last 6 months without facing any serious competition from NVIDIA in the DirectX 11 market. The bad thing about the lack of competition is that end users suffer the brunt of it.  If AMD had no competition they had absolutely no reason to reduce prices which allows them to soak in all the cash.  While I have no bad feelings as the influx of money is welcome for AMD, I do feel that pricing of the HD5800 series of cards seriously needs to be restructured. The HD5830 in the UK right now is still between £150 and £165 which is over the odds, especially when some GTX460s are selling for £130 inc vat.

Currently at this price point we have a hard time recommending the HD 5830 … not that it is a bad card but it is still selling for more than the GTX460 and cant match the performance. As we mentioned earlier we think it is time for AMD to seriously look at pricing of the entire HD 5800 series if they want to maintain the market share they have gained in recent months. If you are one of those people that are loyal only to the ATI brand then the  HIS 5830 iCooler V Turbo is a card worth considering.

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