We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASRock, Kingston, Mittoni, Noctua and Corsair.

The main thing we're looking at today is the kind of performance gain we get from the HD 6850 Cyclone Power Edition from MSI against the reference Sapphire version we first looked at when the card launched.

We've of course included a number of other single cards in our benchmarks, though, which include the AMD HD 6870, Sapphire HD 5870 and GIGABYTE GTX 480.

Let's get started!

3DMark 11

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmark11/
Buy It Here

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world's most popular benchmark. Designed to measure your PC's gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

The nice increase in clock speeds show a solid increase in performance here.