14 DAY TRIAL // Since the AMD Radeon HD 6000 cards have been out for a short while already, it is not surprising to see that overclocked models are already emerging, and Micro-Star International figured it would offer a glimpse of its HD 6850 Cyclone OC.
For those in need of a reminder, the HD 6870 and 6850 were designed as more dangerous opponents to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460.
The HD 6850 is, naturally, the slightly less mighty of the two, but MSI decided to tinker with that aspect a bit.
The new card was pictured not too long ago, along with the cooler that practically gave it its name.
It seems that the PCB (printed circuit board) uses the 6+1+1 phase VRM, which uses high-grade components.
It also seems that a single PCI Express power connector is required to run the video controller, even though it is factory overclocked.
The exact clock speeds that the board has are not exactly mentioned, but supposed overclocking tests had the GPU at at 1,000 MHz, while the memory ran at 1,200 MHz.
Such a test was possible thanks to the support for software voltage control, something denoted by the “power edition” label.
Additionally, when placed through FurMark, it stuck to a temperature of 65 degrees Celsius, this being owed to the aforementioned Cyclone GPU cooler.
It has a heatsink with spirally-projecting aluminum fins, as well as two aluminum fin arrays on either sides of the GPU, linked to the base palate by 8mm heatpipes.
Finally, for video output, MSI threw in an HDMI 1.4a port, as well as a Displayport 1.2 connector, plus two DVI outputs.
Unfortunately, the MSI HD 6850 Cyclone OC Edition is not yet on sale, but should not take long to show up, at which point its price tag will finally be made known.