HIS Radeon 5870 TurboX

Compared to the other cards included in this mini-roundup, the HIS 5870 TurboX certainly doesn’t seem as daunting – the card has no exotic heatpipe cooling and just one fan. The board isn’t outfitted with the super beefy power subsystems found on the other cards either. But when push comes to shove and you’re just comparing frame rates, board temps, and noise levels, the HIS 5870 TurboX does compete well against the Gigabyte and MSI boards we’ve tested, and it comes with a pretty decent game bundle too, as HIS includes a copy of Modern Warfare 2 inside the box.

The board’s most notable feature though is arguably its cooling.


HIS uses a massive copper plate to pull heat off the GPU. By our measurements, this plate is 3.5” in length. In comparison, the copper plate we just discussed previously on the Gigabyte 5870 Super Overclock is roughly 1.5” in surface area making direct contact with the GPU.

Of course, the plate on the Gigabyte card doesn’t have to be as large because it’s connected to four heatpipes, but still, the mass of the copper plate HIS uses is rather impressive. Flanking that plate is a dual-slot aluminum heatsink. Multiple rolled fins are used to increase its surface area.

Again, compared to the other 5870 boards represented here, the aluminum heatsink HIS uses is larger than the relatively slim heatsinks Gigabyte and MSI use on their 5870 boards, but that’s because it has to be. Without the heatpipes that are found on the other boards, the cooling burden on the HIS heatsink is greater than the other two cards, which primarily rely on their heatpipes for the bulk of the GPU cooling.


Surrounding the dual-slot heatsink is a plastic duct. Like other 5870 cards, the duct isn’t completely enclosed, so hot air from the board does escape out the sides and the top of the board, but a decent portion of the heat from the GPU is exhausted out the back of the system case.

The 5870 TurboX is HIS’ fastest Radeon 5870 offering, with the card clocked at 900MHz core/1225MHz (4.9GHz data rate) memory. These speeds are actually higher than the MSI 5870 Lightning board which is featured in this article.

As we mentioned earlier, the board also ships with a copy of Modern Warfare 2. Additionally the board ships with two 6-pin PCIe power adapters, a CrossFire cable, and DVI-to-VGA adapter.