MSI R7850 Power Edition Pro Reviews

So were we expecting exceptional performance from the MSI R7850 Power Edition 2GB video card we have just tested? No, not necessary, but we were proven wrong after a bit of overclocking. The Military Class III VRM design, and Twin Frozr cooler implementation really shows its potential especially when we see that temperatures still stay under 70C on maximum voltage and performance settings. In some cases the MSI R7850 Power Edition graphics card was able to compete with the EVGA GTX 660 SC 2GB video card, which costs roughly $229. The MSI R7850 Power Edition currently goes for $199 which really makes it a great bargain, especially for those AMD fan boys/girls out there. We would like to add that we really liked the Dust Remover technology on this card, and all cards should have this option, however, we were somewhat disappointed that MSI only gave one DVI option on this specific video card. It would have been nice to see Dual DVI port support, because most of the monitors that are used currently use DVI as their main connection. This puts users with multi-monitor configurations into additional expenses for display port adapters, unless the provided DVI to VGA or Mini-DP to DP adapters are useful.

MSI's HD 7850 Power Edition is a solid custom implementation of the HD 7850. It uses a scaled down dual-fan TwinFrozr IV cooler, that was introduced first with the MSI HD 7970 Lightning. Thanks to an overclock of 90 MHz out of the box we see a decent performance increase vs. the stock HD 7850. Averaged over all our testing, the improvement is 7%, which puts the card on par with GTX 480 or HD 6970. The overclock is relatively small though compared to other overclocked HD 7850 cards, a memory overclock would have been nice as well. Our manual overclocking results show that there is plenty of headroom, reaching over 1100 MHz GPU and over 1500 MHz on memory. This would have allowed the card to exceed the HD 7870's performance, making it a very attractive buy for price/performance conscious gamers. MSI's new TwinFrozr IV cooler does an excellent job keeping the card cool, unfortunately that has resulted in excess fan noise under load, reaching the same levels as the HD 7850 reference cooler. In idle however, we see record-low noise levels which are among the best we've seen to date. This could make the card an interesting choice for a desktop system or media PC, which still supports decent gaming. With a price increase of $20 over the AMD HD 7850 reference design, the card can not beat it in performance per Dollar due to the relatively small overclock. Nevertheless, it not an unreasonable price increase.

MSI's Radeon HD 7850 Power Edition doesn't disappoint! I'm not shocked by that, MSI honestly are one of the most consistent companies when it comes to producing quality video cards and the Power Edition series is another one of those lines that stands out against the competition in a big way. Thanks to the ties they have with MSI Afterburner, it really opens up what they can do when it comes to overclocking. Series' like the Power Edition, HAWK and Lightning give MSI the ability to stand out from the competition. I think one of the biggest highlights to these series, though, is that you don't need to have some insane cooling setup to make real use of them. The quality of the Twin Frozr cooler from MSI means that out of the box you're able to achieve clocks higher than competing brand models without doing anything more than load up MSI Afterburner.