MSI Radeon 6850 Cyclone Power review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 12/23/2010 02:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

With the R6850 Cyclone Power Edition, MSI is offering a very potent product, in its baseline performance it is already a decent chunk faster than the reference 6850 products available on the market and there's great overclocking headroom left as well. As you have been able to see, with the help of a Voltage tweak with AfterBurner we were able to push the graphics core over a full GHz .. that's mighty impressive when you realize the default reference clock is just 775 MHz.

Despite that lovely success, we'd of course not recommend you to run the GPU continuously at that clock frequency, but for a fun benchmark run, sure why not :)

The feature-set itself is of course top notch. That improved feature set of course is grand with the new HD3D and UVD 3 update of the video processor. There are no ground-breaking new designs aside from some feature updates. Price performance wise however you have noticed that the R6800 offers a truckload of value for money.

The cooler that MSI uses is very silent and efficient, with it's factory overclock you can expect game temperatures of up-to only 55 degrees C, so that's plenty cooling performance at comfortable noise levels as well. The fact remains that we brought this card over 1000 MHz on the core frequency without any temperature issues, a statement all by itself, it shows that the concept that MSI applies really works.

So the baseline performance of this product is grand... the cooling is just extremely silent, and all that can be purchased for roughly 169/179 EUR. We stated it several times before, the Radeon HD6800 series offers great value for money and you can play any game to date up-to a monitor resolution of 1900x1200 fairly well. As such we can wholeheartedly recommend this product.

It's really interesting to observe where MSI was with their graphics card department 2-3 years ago and where they are now.

More information can be found here.

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