MSI Radeon HD 7850 Power Edition OC review

Final Words & Conclusion

The new TwinFrozr IV cooler is a massive improvement over the revision III cooler we recently tested with the R7870 from MSI. What a difference, what's great about the new cooler revision is that next to its nice looks the temperatures remain absolutely under control. During gaming that means the GPU will stay under 60 Degrees C. Combine that with the fact that you can't hear the cooler and that will put a smile on your face.

The retail price for this MSI Radeon HD 7850 Power edition with TwiNFrozr IV cooler is roughly 225 EUR and that we think is a very fair amount of money for what you get offered.

For that money you get to play your PC games at 1920x1080/1200 pretty darn well.  Just set your image quality preference and the cards will push very nice framerates. If we look at the RTS genre with Anno 2070 at 1920x1200, we get a good 54 FPS on average with the product. That game is locked in at the very best image quality settings with 4x AA enabled.

Battlefield 3 then, here's where we enabled that near silly Ultra quality settings mode and 4x AA. Now the R7850 is a little on the edge here with 33 FPS on average. With our IQ settings and chosen level these are downright respectable numbers compared to other products in the same price range. If you need a little more performance, you can always disable AA.

When you look at the overall package, performance, the new Eyefinity updates, PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all other stuff then we can only conclude that we happily embrace the Radeon HD 7800 series in the mainstream to enthusiast graphics card arena. For those that embrace multi-monitor gaming, it's for you guys that AMD decided to go for the 2GB framebuffer / graphics memory.

Overclocking then, as you have noticed from the reference article and now this review, the 7850 cards are tweaking gems, your maximum with this cooler will roughly be 1200 MHz though. Remember Voltage tweaking is an option with this model and 12 did set the GPU at 1.2 Volts to make the 1200 Mhz happen. But if you compare that all the way back from the reference 860 MHz clock frequency, and that's a 340 MHz difference (compared to the reference baseline clocks).

Concluding I find the MSI R7850 Power edition with TwinFrozr III cooler to be a really fun product. This one has all the variables right from the baseline performance, factory higher clock frequency, the silence and good temperatures. Overall it's a very decent gaming graphics card for anyone with a monitor up-to 1920x1080. Priced at 225 EUR we feel it's a fair deal for a really nice graphics card.

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