MSI R7850 Power Edition 2GD5/OC Review

[siopao1984]

---

MSI has well earned a reputation for making quality custom graphics cards. Here for review we have their newest release, the R7850 Power Edition. With its use of quality components and the new Twin Frozr IV cooler, the card should be a significant improvement over the reference HD 7850. We look forward to putting this factory overclocked version through its paces.

Read more: MSI R7850 Power Edition 2GD5/OC Review by VR-Zone.com

[siopao1984]

Back when the AMD Radeon 7850 'Pitcairn' card launched, we felt it was a competent but not stunning card, primarily due to the fairly steep launch price of US $249. In the couple of months since the launch, several custom cards have launched with non reference PCB's and coolers. MSI is well known for their high quality custom graphics card designs and have overhauled the Radeon 7850 reference design resulting in the R7850 Power Edition.



We'll start with a quick overview of the AMD 7850 GPU. The 7850 is built around the Pitcairn Pro GPU with 1024 'Graphics Core Next' SIMD based stream processors. The move away from prior VLIW based architectures means the GCN cards represent the biggest architectural overhaul since the R600 based 2900XT. It's built using TSMC's high-K metal gate 28nm process which is allowing some Pitcairn cards to ship with 1100Mhz+ core clocks. It supports PCI Express 3.0, a 256 bit memory interface and comes with just a single 6pin PCIe power input thanks to a moderate 130w TDP.

The R7850 Power Edition comes with a 90Mhz factory overclock resulting in a final core clock of 950Mhz with the memory at the reference spec of 1200Mhz (4800Mhz effective.) This brings a theoretical ~10% boost in performance over a reference card. Add in the promised cooler running and quieter noise levels of the Twin Frozr IV cooler and clearly we have something altogether different from the reference card.

MSI typically has three tiers of custom graphics cards. The Lightning series is exclusively reserved for the top end GPU's, the Hawk series is for the upper mid range and the Power Edition series is for the mid range. Like the Lighnings and Hawks, the Power Edition series comes with triple overvoltage control of the GPU, memory and VDDCI thanks to the superb MSI Afterburner application. There should be a heap of overclocking potential on tap.

Before we get to the card itself, lets have a look at the box, accessories and specifications.

The card ships in a fairly compact, well protected box. It is securely fitted in an internal foam shell and should easily survive the handling of sometimes careless couriers.







The accessories list is about what you would expect from a mid range offering. We have the usual driver & software CD as well as a manual and quick start guide. The adapters consist of DVI-VGA, mini Display Port to full size Display Port and twin molex to 6pin PCIe adapters.



Now for the card itself: The R7850 Power Edition uses the latest iteration of MSI's highly regarded Twin Frozr cooler which we'll go over in more detail later. It's a dual slot card yet has a compact length of just 210mm making it a good choice for a small form factor or HTPC case. The card looks good and gives the impression of having very good build quality.





Specifications

Graphics Engine AMD Radeon HD 7850
Technology 28nm
Stream Processors 1024
Interface PCI Express x16 3.0
Memory Type GDDR5
Memory Size (MB) 2048 MB
Memory Interface 256 Bits
Core Clock Speed (MHz) 950
Memory Clock Speed (MHz) 4800
Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) 153.6
Texture Fill Rate( GTexel/s) 60.8
DVI Output (Dual Link) 1
D-SUB Output 1 (via adapter)
HDMI-Output 1
Mini DisplayPort 2
DirectX Version Support 11
OpenGL Version Support 4.2
CrossFire Support Yes
Card Dimension (mm) 210 x 118 x 39

[siopao1984]

There isn't much to note on the rear of the card. The soldering quality is good. The four large screws hold the Twin Frozr IV cooler on.





The outputs of the card are seen below. We have a pair of v1.2 Mini Display ports, a 1.4a HDMI port and a Dual Link DVI port. An included adapter can be used to convert the DVI to a D-Sub port, really though.. its about time that the ancient VGA went the way of the Dodo.





Here we see the top of the card with its single 6pin PCIe power input. On the left is a single CrossfireX connector for a maximum of two cards. It's a dual slot card of course.







Now lets have a look at the Twin Frozr IV cooler. Three 8mm nickel plated heatpipes distribute heat from the core to a large aluminium fin array. The pair of 80mm fans are used for dissipation. The fans feature a dust removal technology where upon power up, the fans spin backwards to dislodge dust buildup before resuming normal operation. As we'll see in our testing later on, the Twin Frozr IV cooler does an excellent job of keeping the temperatures low and is effectively silent in most reasonable usage scenarios.







MSI employs a metal plate to cool the memory and MOSFET sections. All chips have a thermal strip placed between them allowing air from the twin fans to keep everything nice and cool. This plate serves a dual purpose by adding a great deal of rigidity to card.





Now with the plate removed we see the card in the buff. MSI has placed the PWM on the opposite side of the card from the power input. We hope this doesn't introduce any interference to sensitive circuits.





Now for the PWM section itself. MSI uses their trademark Military Class III components and has included an improved 6+1+1 phase PWM design with super ferrite chokes and Hi-C capacitors. The current capabilities of this system are much improved over the reference design with the bonus of an extended expected lifetime.

To the right of the picture is the voltage controller MSI employs, a uPI semiconductor 1637P.





The memory was difficult to photograph. The eight chips are Hynix H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C GDDR5 memory. They are rated for 1250Mhz operation (5000Mhz effective) so it seems a little strange that MSI would choose to run the R7850 PE at 1200Mhz, the same as the reference spec.

[siopao1984]

Software

The MSI R7850 Power Edition comes with the class leading MSI Afterburner utility. Created by Unwinder of Rivatuner fame, Afterburner has become the most popular utility to overclock cards and adjust voltages. It offers a simple user interface, monitoring functions, fan control, video capturing and the ability to save profiles. It really is an excellent utility offering ease of use, simplicity and reliability. Kudos to MSI for allowing not just their own cards to be used and abused with it, but tacitly many of those from other vendors as well. The video capture feature is useful for capturing things like in game sequences. There's a large range of configurable video settings.

The Power Edition series, like the Lightning and Hawk series features triple voltage control over GPU, memory and 'Aux' which changes VDDCI voltage. As the Pitcairn series responds well to bandwidth increases at high core clocks, the ability to put a bit more voltage into the memory is very useful for benchmarkers and overclockers.






Test Setup

CPU i7 3960X @ 4.7Ghz
Motherboard Asus Rampage IV Gene w/ BIOS 0013
Memory 4x4Gb G.Skill Trident @ 2133Mhz 9-10-9-27 1T
Power Supply Antec HCP-1200
Storage Intel 330 Series 180Gb SSD
OS Windows 7 x64 w/ SP1
Graphics Cards
MSI R7850 Power Edition 2GD5/OC
AMD Radeon HD 7970
AMD Radeon HD 7870
ASUS Radeon HD 6970 Direct CU II 2Gb
(AMD Catalyst 12.4 WHQL Driver)

ASUS GTX 560 Direct CU II TOP
(Nvidia Forceware 301.24 Beta)


Overclocking

Both the 7850 and 7870 series cards are known for having excellent overclocking headroom so our expectations for the MSI R7850 Power Edition were high.

Using the MSI Afterburner utility, we were able to achieve full stability with our entire benchmark suite at the final clocks of 1240Mhz at 1.3v for the core and 1490Mhz (5960Mhz effective) for the memory. This is a full 380Mhz GPU clock increase and a 290Mhz memory clock increase over a stock clocked 7850. Some benchmarks were happy running much higher, but some flickering was seen in Alien vs Predator and BF3 which were removed with the more conservative clocks we settled on.

Knowing that only one or two benchmarks caused stability problems, we ran Heaven and pushed as far as we could go. How does a 50% core overclock from a stock 7850 at 860Mhz to 1303/1560(6240) sound? Look at the temperature at just 66% fan speed. Only 61c! This took 1.32vgpu (disclaimer: not recommended outside of quick benching) and a small bump in vmem and vddci to achieve. 1560Mhz on the memory is the maximum the slider would allow. Expect this card to take some number one 7850 scores at HWBOT very soon.



Over 50% core frequency overclock! Awesome!

[siopao1984]

Benchmarks





There are no real surprises in 3DMark 11 although the hefty overclock of the 7850 PE brings it as close as can be expected to the 7970 in performance mode. A superior pixel fillrate due to core clock could be the reason as the 7850 up to the 7970 series all have 32 ROPs.



The situation quite similar to the 3DMark tests. Interestingly, the 6970 gets smashed when faced with high levels of tessellation.



Metro is getting a bit older now but is still a very tough test of even the most powerful graphics cards. Overclocking the 7850 PE brings the card from barely playable to playable when faced with heavy gunfire and explosions.



Stalker places a heavy load on the graphics card when benchmarking the sunshaft test due to heavy shadowing. The 7850 PE gets about a 25% boost in FPS when overclocked.



Alien Vs Predator is another example where the 7850 PE responds well to bandwidth increases with a 25% increase in FPS when overclocked. AvP is one where the 6970 does well.



Now we get to BF3. This is one that likes shader power most of all. The 7970 streaks ahead with double the shader count of the 7850. A 7870 would be a better bet for BF3 players it seems. It is known to OC very well too.



Here's another commendable performance by the 7850 PE. At maximum settings a 7850 Power Edition can cruise through Crysis 2 and gets close to a perfectly smooth 60fps.



Our final benchmark is a test of OpenCL rendering performance. The GPGPU performance of the GCN architecture really comes to the fore here as the older generation cards are left in the dust. It would appear that the number of compute units is king in this benchmark as the 7850 must be significantly overclocked to beat the 7870.

[siopao1984]

Thermals & Noise measurements

We looped the Unigine Heaven benchmark until the GPU temperature reached its maximum. After about 10 minutes we recorded a maximum temperature of just 46c! Very impressive indeed! The fans on the card were spinning at 39% when left at the auto setting.The Twin Frozr IV cooler used for the R7850 Power edition is clearly very efficient and does its job superbly.

With the fan running on auto at 39% with the GPU at full load, the Twin Frozr IV cooler is barely distinguishable over the background noise of a Noctua NF-P14 fan used to cool the CPU. In this case the SPL was measured via SPL meter at 36db, obviously tainted by the Noctua fan (hardly a painfully noisy fan)



With the maximum (reasonably) stable overclock the highest temperature was a very acceptable 61c with the fan set at 66%. Pushing the fan harder generates an uncomfortable tone from the fans. They don't register as particularly loud at 45db, but the tone is very high pitched making them sound a lot noisier than they are. Thankfully we never had to push the fans to uncomfortably high speeds even when pushing the card to the maximum, but do beware of this if you plan in using it in a cramped case with minimal airflow.



At idle the card can be considered silent. A bird chirp in a tree down the road makes more noise.



Conclusion

Theres a lot to like about the MSI R7850 Power Edition. The cooling performance and low noise levels (at <50% speed) on offer from the Twin Frozr IV cooler are amazing. There is almost unprecedented overclocking headroom and demanding games at maximum settings are playable at 1080p resolution, especially when overclocked. You get Afterburner, a low 130w TDP and a compact size ideal for a small form factor case.

The MSI R7850 Power Edition is expected to retail for $269 US putting it at the high end of 7850 cards, and this brings us to the only caveat that prevents us from giving it a top score.. Price. AMD do not feel pressured into dropping the Pitcairn price at this stage and MSI have no choice but to follow the lead.

Strands of MSI Lightning DNA present themselves in the R7850 Power Edition. If only the card were priced closer around the $220 level. Price aside, this is an excellent card.

Pros
Twin Frozr IV cooler performs very well
Overclocking capability
Triple voltage control and the excellent Afterburner utility
Build Quality
Not a power hungry card

Cons
The whole Pitcairn series could use a price drop which would make them exceptional value
Fans are high pitched at high speed, but thankfully high speed isn't really needed
Only 1200Mhz memory clock is very conservative