MSI R7850 Twin Frozr Benchmark

While the MSI R7850 is not the top of the line in terms of graphics card, this card is still able to pack a punch.  Considering the discontinuation of the HD7850 line, the price on these cards is also plummeting at the moment as manufacturers clear out inventory to stock replacement cards such as the newly released HD7790.  Seeing that you can pick up some HD7850’s for less than $170 with two games, this card may actually be one of the best values out there.

Anyhow, enough talking about the generic HD7850, let’s dive into the MSI R7850.  The MSI R7850 comes equipped with the Twin Frozr technology, which has managed to keep this card running rather cool in most cases.  We did have some issues the MSI R7850 in a mid-tower, but the issue was resolved once it wasn’t choked up by bad air flow in a full tower case or on our open test bench.  Out of the box this card comes stocked with a 900mhz core clock, 2048 GDDR5, and HDMI, 2x Mini-DisplayPort 1.2 inputs, and a DVI-I port.  Built to last, MSI gives this card a 10 year life expectancy running full load the entire time.  While I don’t have 10 years to test that, we did have a few hours to benchmark it in game.

Games Benchmarked:

• Battlefield 3
• Metro 2033
• Farcry 3

Software used for benchmarking:

• Fraps
• 3DMark11

Test System:

• CPU: Intel Core I7-2600k
• Mobo : ASUS P8p67 LE
• RAM : 8GB Corsair XMS (CM3X2G1333C9)
• PSU : Silverstone 1000W Bronze Certified
• SSD : 120GB Kingston SSDNow V300

GPU:

• Model R7850
• 900Mhz Core Clock
• 2GB of GDDR5
• 256 Bit Memory Interface
• DirectX 11
• Cost : $209

For more information, visit MSI’s Website.

 

 

Metro 2033

I feel Metro 2033 is still one of the more demanding games out there and though the MSI R7850 would be a good challenger.  The MSI R7850 did rather well considering it was capable of running the game on very high video settings, with AAA enabled, and still maintained an acceptable frame rate over 30 FPS.  However, there really isn’t much room for the most intense scenes in this game, so i’m going to have to say high settings are probably where this card shines the most in this game, at least while AAA is enabled.

 

 

 

Battlefield 3

In Battlefield 3 the MSI R7850 had no issue delivering 1080p graphics on ultra settings, with 4xAA enabled.  I’d really like to find the guy on twitter who responded to AMD during a live tweet and said that the HD7850 would not be capable of handling Battlefield 3 on ultra settings.  I’d love to send him the benchmarks on this one.

Farcry 3

Out of all the games we benchmarked, we really felt Farcry 3 was the one to beat.  With the exception of having 8xAA enabled, this card really dominated Farcry 3 on every setting.  If you are someone who just has to have 8xAA enabled at all times, the MSI R7850 was still able to handle the game on medium while keeping the average FPS above 30 FPS.

Thoughts:

Considering you can buy this card right now for $209, and get Bioshock Infinite as well as Tomb Raider,  the MSI R7850 might be the best budget card on the market at this moment.  However the question still remains, can it play Crysis?  Until we manage to get our hands on a copy, we won’t know.  However after the benchmarks Clixxer and I did yesterday, I’m going to say,”Yes”, it definitely can play Crysis.