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.