Introduction

As the name suggests, MSI's new HD 4890 Cyclone SOC is based on AMD's HD 4890 GPU Series featuring the RV790 GPU. Even though a 40 nm GPU has been announced in form of RV740, AMD has chosen to product RV790 in the proven 55 nm process which offers considerably better yields and uses readily available production facilities.

MSI has taken AMD's base design and heavily modified it for their purposes. The MSI R4890 Cyclone Series actually consists of three cards:

• R4890 Cyclone: 850 MHz Core, 975 MHz Memory
• R4890 Cyclone OC: 880 MHz Core, 975 MHz Memory
• R4890 Cyclone SOC 1000 MHz Core, 1000 MHz Memory

This review covers the R4890 Cyclone SOC which is MSI's highest end product in this series.
All cards are using a big 100 mm heatpipe cooler and feature native HDMI.

Packaging

MSI's packaging is dominated by black which makes it look stylish and elegant. The front has only the most basic product information, while the back goes into much more detail what separates this product from the competition. One other thing that I noticed is that the cardboard that makes up the package is rather thin which gives the whole box a quite flimsy feeling.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation + Driver CD
• PCI-Express power cables

The Card

The center of attraction of the R4890 Cyclone is the big GPU cooler which goes a bit beyond the edge of the PCB. Height wise the total height of the card + cooler including PCI-E connector is 130 mm. As expected the card uses a dual slot cooling concept, please note the pretty MSI stamp in the slot cover.


The card has one analog port, one DVI port and one HDMI port. Having an analog port is important for many users because they don't want (or know how) to use DVI adapters. If you want to connect the card to your big TV screen you can use the native HDMI output which supports HDMI Audio as well.
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users.


You may combine up to four HD 4890 cards in CrossFire for increased performance or higher image quality settings. You are of course free to mix HD 4890 cards from any manufacturers for CrossFire. Be advised however that the cards will all sync to match the lowest common clock speed and memory size. Also I would like to point out that even though the cooler protrudes beyond the card and looks like it would block the CrossFire bridge, this is not the case as the second picture shows. The bridge bends nicely around the cooler - as long as you have standard spaced PCI-E slots.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.