MSI R6850 Cyclone PE Graphics Card Review - PAGE 1

It's hard to believe that AMD launched their Barts-based graphics cards over seven months ago, but even as we head into another quarter and eventually the launch of a new graphics card series, the Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 still represent excellent value in the GPU market. This is mainly due to both models effectively lowering the price of what was essentially AMD's first generation DirectX 11 flagship performance. At the sub-$200 price point, the Barts-based graphics cards were able to hit a sweet spot in the market.

Adding to the overall value even further, most of AMD's AIB partners took the reference card design and improved upon it by adding features such as custom thermal solutions, higher clock frequencies and even by giving users direct GPU voltage control Features such as these increased the overall performance of the graphics cards, but they also allowed the end-user to overclock the GPU to insane levels, which also improves the price to performance ratio.

The Barts-based card we are going to be looking at in this review is the HD R6850 Cyclone Power Edition from MSI. It includes all the aforementioned features to improve the value and performance as well as a few unique features to facilitate even higher overclocking potential. Essentially, what MSI has done is include their highly efficient Cyclone thermal design along with their Military Class II components, a 6+1 phase design and a triple overvoltage feature. MSI has also tweaked the clock speeds of the R6850 Cyclone PE, so this product will already have improved performance out-of-the-box.

It's easy to see that MSI has gone all out with the design of the R6850 Cyclone PE, so we are expecting to see excellent results in terms of performance, overclocking, cooling and acoustics.