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.