MSI Radeon 6850 Cyclone Power review - Introduction

Despite the Radeon HD 6900 series was just released, for this editor one of the more exciting product releases this year has been AMD's Radeon 6800 series. The Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 have had a warm welcome already in the mid-range gaming segment of graphics cards.

ODMs know this and as such they just love to pimp up products that people like, MSI submitted a Radeon HD 6850 for a test here at Guru3D.com and as such we'd be more than happy to bring you a full review on one of their newest products today, the Cyclone POWER edition of the Radeon HD 6850.

The new mid-range series 6800 delivers a very decent chunk of gaming performance, a set of new features and, as always, will carry a friendly 169 EUR price tag.

The product is based on MSI's military class component selection including the new SFC (Super Ferrite) chokes. The card looks robust and well built. It has 6 phases available on the GPU area and another phase for its one gigabyte of memory.

The card comes factory clocked for you at a nice 860 MHz on the core and 4400 MHz on the memory (affective data rate). Now, perhaps you guys can remember it, early reports have shown that this card was able to achieve 1000 MHz on the core frequency, based on a core voltage tweak of course. Sitting on top of the GPU is the known Cyclone cooler.

The MSI R6850 Cyclone Power Edition has four connectors, two DVI connectors, one HDMI and of course a display port connector.

Let's have a quick peek at the new duo and then head onwards into the review, where we'll cover the features, architecture, photo-shoot, power consumption and heat levels and benchmarks... oh yeah... you are in for the entire Guru3D treat today. Next page you guys.