Final Thoughts

It's great to see another model from HIS get the Turbo treatment. What's also great about the Turbo series is unlike some other companies that offer overclocked models, the increase that HIS give us is actually noticeable and does a good job of improving performance across the board.

Compared to the stock HD 5850, the HIS does an excellent job of making itself stand out against a model with reference clocks. Against the GTX 470 the overclock HIS gives us does an excellent job of battling the model. At 1680 x 1050 where the GTX 470 often wins out the HIS HD 5850 Turbo manages to still slightly fall behind. In saying that, though, the gap becomes smaller. At 1920 x 1200 and 2560 x 1600 we see the extra grunt kicks in from the overclock and we see a number of wins against the new model from NVIDIA that sits more expensive.

If the extra performance wasn't enough to convince you to look at the HIS HD 5850 Turbo, its bundle which includes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or the cooling which makes it the coolest running card that we've tested on our new testbed just might be.

The Turbo series continue to stand out and show us that HIS can make some killer cards. If you're looking at a HD 5850 and want a bit more power from the card I would highly recommend you taking the time to check out the Turbo variant of the model from HIS.