Value Meets Performance: HD 4890 Cards from Gigabyte and MSI

A Closer Look at the MSI HD 4890 1GB Cyclone OC

MSI took an interesting approach when it came to designing their Cyclone OC cards as everything from inductor placing to PCB layout has been customized. At a length of 8.75” it is also shorter than a reference-based HD 4890. However, the one thing that sticks out the most about this card isn’t its striking red PCB or its short stature but rather the massive Cyclone heatsink.


The Cyclone heatsink is a wonder to behold with its massive 100mm center-mounted fan and circular fin arrays. It uses four of MSI’s self-styled Super Pipes to move heat quickly away from the core to the fins. Even though it looks like an engineering marvel, there are some serious problems in paradise since our sample and 4 other samples members of our staff had exhibited issues with the mounting of the Cyclone cooler. Basically, the cooler uses a reference HD 4890 backplate which doesn’t allow for enough mounting pressure between the contact plate and the GPU core. Not only does this cause the cooler to rock back and forth like a drunk sailor but means in the temperature testing section we will see some spectacularly high temperatures. Don’t worry though, we will also show you a way to alleviate this issue a bit later.


We see the usual dual 6-pin connectors are used by MSI but all the interesting stuff is happening on the backplate. Here we see that MSI has included every connector you could possibly want other than DisplayPort. You get a DVI, VGA and a HDMI connector but if you want to use dual DVI connectors you are out of luck since there isn’t a HDMI to DVI adaptor included.