HIS HD 5830 iCooler V Turbo Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and the 58303. Test System4. 3DMark Vantage5. Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.16. HQV Benchmark7. Aliens vs Predator8. Crysis Warhead9. Call of Duty MW210. Battlefield Bad Company 211. Lost Planet 2 12. Left For Dead 213. Thermal Dynamics14. Overclocking15. Total system power usage16. Final Thoughts17. View All Pages

Today we have another graphics card from HIS to test. This time around we will be focusing our attention on the HIS HD 5830 1GB PCI-e.  This is a product that sits somewhere between the 5770 and 5850 both in terms of price and performance.

Currently here in Canada the most popular online retailers like NewEgg.ca and NCIX.com have 5830’s selling for anywhere from $210 to $279 depending on the manufacturer and bundle being offered. The reference  clocked HIS 5830 iCooler V is currently listed on NewEgg.ca for $226 CDN.

When it comes to reviewing the HD 5830 it is a difficult choice as to what type of system to build around the card.  Since it falls between the 5770 and 5850 we have opted to use our 1055T powered system, it should be interesting to see how close it will come to the performance of the HD 5850 we just looked at recently.

We don't expect the HIS 5830 to perform on par to the 5850 but we believe our tests will show that the HD 5830 provides good performance for a card that is priced close to $200.

Product	HIS HD5830 iCooler V Turbo	HIS HD5850 iCooler V Turbo
GPU	5830	5850
Core Clock	840 MHz	765 MHz
Memory Clock	4.4Gbps /// MHz	4.5Gbps /// MHz
Memory Size	1024 MB	1024 MB
Memory Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Interface	256 bit	256 bit
Shaders	1120 Unified	1440 Unified
ROP's	16	32
Pixel Fillrate	13.4 GPixel/s	24.5 GPixel/s
Interface	PCI Express x16 (PCI Express 2.1)	PCI Express x16 (PCI Express 2.1)

The HIS 5830 is supplied in the same tall, thin box as the HIS 5850.

Once again the packaging is branded with graphics related to the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 game that is bundled with the HIS 5830 iCooler V Turbo.  The only visible difference being the model number of the card inside.

The back of the package contains information pertaining to graphics standards that the card supports such as Shader Model 5.0, DX 11, HDMI, OPEN CL and OpenGL 3.2.

After removing the contents from the packaging we find all the required goodies needed to get us up and running.  There is the disc containing the drivers for our 5830 as well as the product manual in PDF format. There is a Crossfire Bridge, 1 DVI/VGA adapter, 2 Molex to 6  pin PCI-e cables and of course the coupon for the free digital Steam version of COD MW2.  COD MW2 is a good quality game and makes a nice addition when included as part of a product bundle. In some cases this free game may even be the deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

Located under these initial items we find the HIS 5830 graphics card.  Once again COD MW2 is the main area of focus when we look at the molded shroud that covers the heatsink.

The card features a blue 9 blade center mounted fan that will distribute air over the entire surface of the heatsink,  and thanks to the vented portion of the face plate some of the hot air will be expelled out the rear of the chassis.

As we move along we have the two 6pin power inputs which follows the reference design. We will require 2 PCI-e 6 pin cables to provide the power necessary to run our card.

This image shows us where the fan connects to the PCB to get power and also gives us a peek at the heatsink used to cool the 5830. We can see that this extends almost the entire length of the card and should provide more then adequate cooling.

The HIS 5830 comes with 2 DVI dual link ports, an HDMI port as well as 1 Display Port connection. The Display Port is currently a requirement if we want to expand to a multiple display Eyefinity setup using 3 or more displays.

At KitGuru when we test graphics cards we try our best to build a test system that suits the intended target audience.  Since the 5830 is a doesnt really classify as a budget priced card our test system will be built using the same Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H v2.0 Crossfire ready motherboard and overclocked HexaCore AMD Phenom II X6 1055T processor running at 3.5 GHz that we used when we reviewed the HIS 5850.  Our OS drive in this build is a 64GB Kingston V-Series Rev2 SSD and files are stored on a 500 GB WD SATA II drive.

The test system is built from scratch with a fresh Windows 7 Professional install, all patches have been installed via Windows Update.

Test System

Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H v2.0
HexaCore AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
HIS 5850 iCooler V Turbo 1GB PCI-e
HIS 5830iCooler V  Turbo 1GB PCI-e
8GB G Skill DDR III 1600
Corsair HX850 modular PSU (80 Plus Silver rating)
NZXT Phantom Full Tower
Kingston 64 GB V-Series SSD (OS drive)
Western Digital 500 GB SATA II(Storage)
LG 16X DVDRW optical drive
Samsung SyncMaster 245BW

Software

Windows 7 Professional x64
FRAPS Professional x64
Catalyst 10.8
3DMark Vantage
Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.1
HQV Benchmark
Lost Planet 2 Benchmark

Games

Aliens vs Predator
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
Crysis Warhead
Battlefield Bad Company 2
Left 4 Dead 2

All the latest bios updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru test all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.
Our minimum frame rate game graphs have three main zones. These are sampled over a specific 30 interval period of time and then mapped into a chart. These are handy reference guides to detail worst case performance of the product being reviewed. When we test video cards we try to find the best combination of resolution and image quality settings while still maintaining playable frame rates.

Over 30fps is the zone most people want at all times, this means perfectly smooth frame rates with no hitching.

Between 30fps and 25fps is the KitGuru ‘Playable’ zone, although some people might notice occasional stuttering in specific scenes.

Under 25fps is classed as the KitGuru ‘Danger Zone’ which means that the game experience will be less than impressive. Settings and/or resolution would need lowered to help smooth out the frame rate.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  For today we will be testing focusing on both Performance and Extreme resolutions. The default setting that most people use to compare their scores world wide is 1280×1024 which is referred to as the Performance level.

Looking at the results from the first 2 GPU tests in Vantage we have the HIS 5830 only 3-4 frames per second behind our HIS 5850 at Extreme testing presets. At the lower Performance settings the gap spreads a bit further falling 5-6 frames per second behind the 5850. Considering the 5830 is as much as $100 less expensive it could serve as a very viable option for someone that cant afford to drop $300+ to purchase a 5850. The money saved by purchasing the HIS 5830 could easily score you a small SSD drive or an additional 4GB of DDR III for your system build.

Unigine is a top-notch technology, that can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of our customers claim that they have never seen such an extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. It is already used in the development of different projects (mostly games).

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We always test Unigine at 1920×1080 (1080p) at default settings so comparisons with other graphics cards in Kitguru reviews are possible.

Our HIS 5830 was able to maintain an average of 27 FPS through the entire testing period. Our review sample peaked at a maximum of 66.6 FPS at 1080p which is quite impressive for that resolution. Our only area of concern was the 16 FPS minimum, however even the more powerful 5850  had a low of 17.4 FPS in the same test.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

When AMD released the Catalyst 10.6 drivers back in June of this year they made additions to the settings that deal with video playback quality. They have added settings such as Mosquito Noise Reduction and De-blocking to help to provide the best video quality possible. Many people will wonder what these features are for so we have added a definition of these terms to help understand their relevance.

Definition of: mosquito noise:
A distortion that appears near crisp edges of objects in MPEG and other video frames that are compressed with the discrete cosine transform (DCT). It occurs at decompression when the decoding engine has to approximate the discarded data by inverting the transform model. The mosquito noise appears as random aliasing in these areas and requires sophisticated detection circuits to eliminate it. As TVs get larger, mosquito noise and other artifacts become more noticeable.

Deblocking filter (video)
A deblocking filter is applied to blocks in decoded video to improve visual quality and prediction performance by smoothing the sharp edges which can form between blocks when block coding techniques are used. The filter aims to improve the appearance of decoded pictures.

	AMD HD5830
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	2
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	193

The HIS 5830 scored 193 out of a possible 210 points which is an excellent result for this extensive series of tests.

Aliens versus Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game developed by Rebellion Developments and published by Fox Interactive for PC and Apple Macintosh computers in 1999. It is based on the Alien and Predator media franchises and the crossover Alien vs. Predator franchise. It was unofficially ported to Linux in 2001 and Xbox in 2009, following Rebellion's public release of the game's source code. A sequel, Aliens versus Predator 2, was developed by Monolith Productions and released by Sierra in 2001.

Like the 1994 Alien vs Predator game for the Atari Jaguar, Aliens versus Predator offers three separate campaigns, each playable as a separate species: Alien, Predator, or human Colonial Marine.[2] Each player character has different objectives, abilities, and weapons. The single-player campaign presents the player with a conventional series of levels to progress through that are designed around the abilities of each character.

To test the HIS 5830 iCooler V Turbo we will play some AVP at 1920×1200 with DX 11 Texture Quality on Very High, Shadow Complexity High, ambient occulsion on, Motion Blur, MSAA Samples 1,  16af. It should be interesting to see how the HIS 5830 matches up to its big brother the HIS 5850 in this DirectX 11 shooter.

The HIS 5830 performed rather well and stood up to it's big brother providing decent performance through the entire test. The 5830 was able to stay within 5-6 frames per second in minimum and average frames per second. Only when we compare the maximum frame rates did the gap widen.

Crysis Warhead: Take on the fight as the volatile Sergeant “Psycho” Sykes in a new parallel story taking place during the events of Crysis. Psycho’s secret mission will take him to the other side of the island on a ruthless pursuit of a North Korean general hell-bent on obtaining powerful technology. With the versatile powers of his Nanosuit and an arsenal of fully customizable weapons & vehicles at his disposal, Sykes will do whatever it takes to carry out his top-secret objective.

Action on the other side of the island is more intense, the battles are fierce, and the mission protocol is no longer “Adapt to Survive”. As Sergeant Sykes, now you must adapt to dominate the battle. Twin SMG’s blazing, seizing new vehicles, or going stealth, the action and the victory is on your terms.

For our testing today we are using the Gamer preset for our level of graphic details. We will be running our testing at the maximum resolution of 1920×1200 pixels using our 24″ Samsung LCD monitor. We will run each test 5 times and the average results of the 5 tests will be represented by the numbers in our graphs.

The HIS HD 5830 performed better then we had anticipated in this test by averaging over 36 FPS with our details preset to the Gamer settings.  What makes this even more impressive is the fact we tested at our maximum available resolution of 1920×1200. The 5850 showed off it's power in this test averaging almost 10 FPS more then the 5830.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is set five years after the conclusion of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Despite the efforts of the Marines and the SAS, the Ultranationalists seize control of Russia and enshrine Imran Zakhaev, the deceased leader of the Ultranationalists, a hero and martyr. Meanwhile, Vladimir Makarov, one of Zakhaev's former lieutenants, begins a reign of terror against Europe by staging numerous terror attacks. The game follows two major factions. One of those is Task Force 141, a multinational military force assigned with eliminating Makarov and the Ultranationalists. The other is the U.S. Army Rangers, who fight in Afghanistan and then, following a Russian invasion of the United States, in the area surrounding Washington D.C. Traitors are revealed in the U.S. forces and protagonists are named as war criminals. The game culminates with Captains “Soap” MacTavish and John Price going into hiding after being betrayed by Lt. General Shepherd.

To test our HIS 5830 with COD MW2 we are using the Team Player mission from the single player campaign. In this level the team attack an Afghan town after the bridge is destroyed by OpFor soldiers. Our testing resolution is set to 1920×1080 or what is more commonly referred to as the HD standard 1080p.

The HIS 5830 iCooler V performed admirably in our Call of Duty testing never dropping below 50 FPS while averaging almost 90 FPS.  These awesome frame rates made for excellent game play that was as smooth as one could hope for with no stuttering or hitching of any kind.

Battlefield Bad Company™ 2 brings the spectacular Battlefield gameplay to the forefront of next-gen consoles and PC, featuring best-in-class vehicular combat set across a wide range of huge sandbox maps each with a different tactical focus. New vehicles like the All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) and the UH-60 transport helicopter allow for all-new multiplayer tactics in the warzone. Extensive fine-tuning ensures that this will be the most realistic vehicle combat experience to date. Tactical destruction is taken to new heights with the updated DICE Frostbite engine. Players can now take down entire buildings or create their own vantage points by blasting holes through cover, thereby delivering a unique dynamic experience in every match.

Today we will be testing our cards during Operation Aurora which is the first mission of the Single player campaign. We are testing at 1920×1200 with in game details set to High with 1MSAA, 16AF, v-sync off and HBAO enabled.

The HIS 5830 iCooler V Turbo proved in this game that it is no slouch. We experienced very smooth play through our entire test averaging over 50 FPS. Our review sample was never even close to entering into our FPS Danger Zone and was able to maintain a minimum of 42 FPS which is very good at the settings we used for our testing. This is a good example of how a reasonably priced 5830 offers a good value for your dollar.

Lost Planet 2 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition which is also made by Capcom, taking place ten years after the events of the first game, on the same fictional planet. The game was developed for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows. Originally set to be released in early 2010, Capcom delayed the game's consoles release to May 11, 2010 in North America and Europe and May 20, 2010 for Japan, and the Windows release for October 12, 2010.

Capcom and NVIDIA have recently released a preview of Lost Planet 2 that runs in either DirectX 9 or DirectX 11 mode. This release allows users to determine if their hardware is suitable enough to achieve good performance when the game is released in October 2010. They have included 2 series of tests. The first is a 3 part test that uses scenes from different areas within the game. While the 2nd test pushes the DirectX 11 features to their maximum.  While we normally dont use a pre defined benchmark script to determine our numbers, we decided to add it today because of the fact that it uses DirectX 11 features. The first group of tests allow us to select which level of DirectX 11 features are tested,we can choose between None, Low, Medium or High.

HIS HD 5830

HIS HD 5850

With the DX 11 settings on low the HIS 5830 was able to maintain average frame rates in the 30's at 1920×1080 resolution with an average of 31.9 spread across the 3 tests. The results of the first test were the highest with a minimum of 24 FPS, the second test our minimum dropped to 22 FPS and only 18 FPS in the 3rd test.

Since this is not the final product this test may not offer a true representation of actual performance level on 5000 series cards seeing that it was released by NVIDIA after all. After doing more testing with this benchmark I am convinced that it is more of a NVIDIA product showcase then a true apples to apples benchmark since the 5850 only managed an average of 34.7 FPS with DX11 settings on low.

Left 4 Dead 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter game. It is the sequel to Valve Corporation’s award-winning Left 4 Dead. The game launched on November 17, 2009, for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in the United States; it launched November 20 in Europe. It builds upon the cooperatively-focused gameplay of the original and uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine, the same game engine used in Left 4 Dead. The game made its world premiere at E3 2009 with a trailer during the Microsoft press event.

While not the most demanding game it is still a popular title among the gaming community. We are testing the Hard Rain mission with all of our in game settings set to the maximum. We have also set our advanced settings to have 8MSAA and 16AF enabled.

As we expected both cards had little trouble providing excellent frame rates. The HIS HD 5830 maintained a very respectable average of 59.85 FPS and only dropped to a minimum of 52 FPS.

All of our tests were performed with our ambient room temperature at a comfortable 23c. To determine our idle temperatures we let the machine idle in Windows for 30 minutes, then we fire up Crysis Warhead to heat up our GPU to generate the heat that determines our results. After gaming testing is done we also run the card through a Furmark torture test just to see how well the cooler works under conditions that it would not normally be subjected to. The fan on our 5830 will be left on auto to help determine the true ability of the cooler.

The cooling on the HIS 5830 works very well.  Our idle temperature was 35c and we hit 60c playing Crysis Warhead. With the fan on the 5830 set to Auto our temperatures never passed 68c during our Furmark testing and the fan speed never passed 61% which is very good considering the stress Furmark places on a graphics card.

It's time to see what the overclocking potential of our review sample is like. The card we are testing comes overclocked directly from the factory. The reference clock speeds for the 5830 are 800/1000 and our card comes clocked at 840/1100. With some additional help from MSI Afterburner we managed to get as high as 900/1200 while maintaining stability.

Our increase in clock speeds gained us an additional 2 FPS on our minimum and average results and 4 more on our maximum FPS. While not a massive increase any free performance is always welcome.

Vantage also show gains across the board gaining an extra 755 points in our overall GPU score which is not bad at all.

To test our power draw we will be using the P3 Kill A Watt.  This handy little utility will show tell us how much power we are pulling directly from the wall socket. The results we will show are based total system power draw as apposed to being able to narrow it down specifically to our graphics card.  It will however provide useful information pertaining to what sort of power usage to expect if you are using a comparable system at home. The results will be done with our monitor powered from a seperate socket so we get just the system draw as our results.

Our first image shows that our system without a monitor is using 137 watts of power when it is in an idle state. Not bad at all for an overclocked six core AMD CPU and the HIS 5830 as our graphics card.

When we fire up Crysis our system is now using 260 watts of total power during our game testing.

The final image was taken with Furmark running. During this test our total system power usage topped out at 289 watts which again very respectable for a system like the one we used for our testing.

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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