Introduction

Recently we've seen MSI really mix it up when it comes to graphics cards. We had a look at a GTX 260 from the company which came in under the new Lightning series. Under this same category we've recently seen the GTX 275 show up with it being the graphics card of choice at the recent MSI overclocking championships.

While the Lightning series seems to be reserved for the NVIDIA cards, ATI models haven't been left without. The HD 4890 we're looking at sits in the new Cyclone series. Within the Cyclone series we've got three models; the standard Cyclone model followed by an OC and SOC model.

Since MSI told us that they were simply sending over the HD 4890 Cyclone, when I discovered there was three versions my fingers were crossed that it was going to be one of the OC models and fortunately it was.

We're not going to talk about how the HD 5800 series is just around the corner and how we're seeing more of this older model now than we have over the past few months, since we pretty much covered that in our review of the HIS card. Instead we'll simply get stuck into the package to see what MSI have going on before looking at card itself, the clocks this SOC models offers and then check out what that does for performance.