Video Card

Looking at the card itself, you can see the cooler which we saw on the front of the box. What's surprising, though, is the size. Looking at it on the front of the box without the card in the picture, you're not sure how big it'll be. Once you have it in front of you with the card attached you notice the size. Sporting a 100mm fan with heat pipes around it, it's a pretty large cooler.

On the topic of heat pipes, this card uses MSIs new SuperPipe. These are thicker 8mm pipes which MSI say are 90% more effective when compared to standard heat pipes. We can see a bit of the PCB to the right, but really, thanks to the huge cooler there isn't a whole lot more to look at.

Taking a quick spin around the card, we've got two 6-Pin PCI Express power connectors which is a bit different to the 8 + 6 Pin setup we normally see. Staying across the top of the card but closer to the front, we've got two Crossfire connectors. If you want to use them, though, you're out of luck no thanks to the massive cooler that MSI has implemented.

Having a look at the front of the card, we can see MSI are using the same formula as HIS and a few other HD 4890s we've seen lately. We've got a Dual-Link DVI connector, standard VGA port along with a native HDMI port. Above these ports we've got some vents with the MSI logo also being seen.

Specifications

As we've already mentioned, there are three versions of the HD 4890 Cyclone. While we don't have the SOC model, we do have the standard OC one. We can see below that the core has been moved from the default 850MHz to 880MHz.

As for the 1GB of GDDR5, there hasn't been any changes with it remaining at 975MHz or 2900MHz QDR. Hopefully the small bump in core gives us a boost in performance at the right spots.