MSI Radeon HD 7850 Power Edition OC review - Introduction

The MSI R7850 Power Edition OC with TwinFrozr IV cooler

Currently one of the more value product series in the AMD Radeon range are the Radeon HD 7850 and 7870. AMD's partners are very savvy to release products based on these cute products as they perform well, quite well actually.

For those that missed it or need a little extra information, two graphics cards have been released in the 7800 series, Pitcairn XT (GPU codename) is the AMD Radeon HD HD7870 - it comes with 20 Compute Units carrying 1280 Stream Processors, 80 texture units and 32 ROPs. The AMD reference core and memory frequencies clock in at an impressive 1000 MHz on the GPU and 1200MHz (4800MHz effective GDDR5) on the memory, this product is equipped with 2GB memory running over a 256-bit memory interface. AMD brands this product the "One GHz Edition" due to the reference clock frequency. This means that AMD's partners can release products clocked even higher.

Pitcairn Pro is the GPU that empowers the Radeon HD 7850, it features 16 Compute Units, 1024 Stream (shader) Processors, 64 texture units and 32 ROPs. Its core and memory frequencies fall behind that of the 7870 but it is still clocked at a good 860 MHz core with 1.20GHz (4800 MHz effective) on the memory. The 7850 tested has 2GB of graphics memory, but for this model we expect to see both 2GB and 1GB memory variants in the stores. Again, the memory is based on a 256-bit interface.

Just a few days ago we reviewed the MSI Radeon HD 780 TwinFrozer III OC series, a product that is nice, yet the cooling solution could not please us.

Good news though, the TwinFrozr IV cooler for the 7800 series has arrived, and today we'll look at the MSI R7850 Power Edition OC with that TwinFrozr IV cooler. The updated cooler has much better looks and MSI’s proprietary TwinFrozr IV cooling system that packs 8mm thick nickel-plated copper heatpipes to convey heat drawn directly from the GPU to a large aluminum fin array, ventilated by two 80 mm fans. These fans are based on the new dust removal technology, which means that the 1st 30- seconds they'll spin backwards in an attempt to remove any residual dust that can build up over time.

This OC edition can be tweaked on three levels, the GPU, the memory and the VDDCI meaning it's rather overclockable. As mentioned the card comes factory overclocked albeit a little, the GPU core is running at 950 MHz whereas the memory is clocked at reference frequencies.

Have a peek at the 225 EUR card, and then let's start up this review.