While here at PC Perspective we have been busy with Hawks and Lightning, OCIA went for a Cyclone. The particular whirlwind in this case being the MSI R6850 Cyclone PE/OC, which as the name implies sports a custom cooling solution and a factory overclock. The custom cooler really makes this card stand out, instead of the full shroud we are used to seeing there is a 90mm PWM-controlled 9-blade fan with the card its self being fully exposed. The overclock, 85 MHz on the GPU taking it to 860MHz and the memory bumped 100MHz to 1.1GHz, 4.4GHz effective, which OCIA made even more impressive by overvolting the card with MSI’s Afterburner software. To MSI’s credit, the card is priced similarly to other HD6850s unlike many other factory overclocked cards which carry a premium price tag. If you have less than $200 to spend on a GPU, this card might be for you.
"Discrete computer graphics are one of the toughest markets to keep current with. New graphics cores are released on a pretty frequent basis from both ATI and NVIDIA and with naming schemes that change nearly as often, it can be difficult to determine where each card stands in relation to others in the same price range. Today we will be taking a look at the MSI R6850 PE / OC graphics card, a mid-range GPU that was launched at the end of last year. Codenamed Barts, this GPU is built on a 40nm process with support for DirectX 11 & Open GL 4.0. Other notable features include HDMI 1.4a & DisplayPort 1.2 support as well as AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology and CrossfireX support."
Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:
- Sapphire HD 6450 1 GB Passive @ techPowerUp
- AMD Radeon HD6850 & HD6950 CrossFire Performance @ BmR
- HIS Radeon HD6970 IceQ Turbo GFX @ Metku.net
- Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB DiRT 3 Edition Graphics Card Review @ HardwareHeaven
- Open-Source Radeon HD 6000 Series Still Borked @ Phoronix
- AMD ATI Chips Comparison Table @ Hardware Secrets
- Radeon Driver Power Management Has Room For Improvement @ Phoronix
- Desktop Graphics Card Comparison Guide Rev. 23 @ Tech ARP
- Asus Geforce Direct CU II, GTX580 and GTX570 @ The Inquirer
- ECS GTX 560 vs Zotac GTX 560: Budget cards battle @ t-break
- ASUS RoG Matrix GTX 580 Platinum 1.5GB DX11 Video Card Review @Hi Tech Legion