A Closer Look

We have seen MSI's cooler on several graphics cards before, it uses two heatpipes to keep the card cool.


MSI's HD 6850 runs fine with just a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connection.


MSI has placed a little switch near the edge of the long side of the PCB, which allows selection between the default and a silent BIOS. For this to activate you need to reboot the system.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


Instead of the expensive CHiL voltage regulator from the reference design, MSI is using uPI's uP6219 on their card, which offers voltage control through MSI Afterburner.


AMD's new Barts graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 1.7 billion transistors on a die area of 255 mm². This is also the first GPU to carry the AMD logo instead of the ATI logo.