Introduction

A few months ago, AMD, which pioneered DirectX 11 compliant PC consumer graphics, released its second-generation Radeon HD 6800 DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The company has enjoyed a 6 month head-start into the race for DirectX 11 graphics hardware market dominance, which also reflected in both growth of market-share, and domination in sales. The time passed by also allowed AMD to refine and fine-tune its architecture to better suit the existing 40 nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per mm² of die-area (plays an important role in product pricing), compared to the previous-generation Evergreen architecture.

MSI's HD 6850 Cyclone Power Edition is a fully customized HD 6850 design that comes with own PCB, custom cooling solution and considerably increased clocks over the AMD reference version. One special feature is the inclusion of a BIOS switch like on the HD 6900 Series. On this card it is uses to switch to a low-noise fan settings BIOS.

Packaging

MSI's standard package shows the card on the front and additional product highlights on the back.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• DVI adapter
• PCI-Express power cable

The Card

MSI is using a custom PCB and their Cyclone cooler on the HD 6850 Cyclone Power Edition.


HD 6850 requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, one DisplayPort and one HDMI port. AMD's display output logic is clearly superior to what NVIDIA has to offer at this time. Vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time. AMD has also introduced DisplayPort 1.2 support with their new cards which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.

An HDMI sound device is also included in the GPU. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. The new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.


You may combine up to two HD 6850 and HD 6870 cards in CrossFire for increased performance or improved image quality settings.


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.