MSI R7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5 Review

Nvidia’s launch of the GTX 670 has really shaken up the high-end GPU segment and it’s about time as well. AMD were the first to get their cards in the market, but they didn’t anticipate Kepler to be this powerful and also so competitive in pricing. Today we’ll be looking at MSI’s take on the HD 7950 with their Twin Frozr edition. We’ve loved these versions of GPUs from MSI and this time is no different.

Design and Build
MSI has stripped off the stock cooler and slapped on one of their custom coolers. The card is bare, apart from a bit of trim on the front. This gives you a clear view of the massive heatsink sitting on the PCB and also makes it easy to clean any dust that will eventually settle on it. It’s quite a heavy card as well due to all the metal used. The aluminium heatsink also features heatpipes that carry the heat from the core and spreads it through the fins. This is then cooled by the twin ‘propeller’ type fans. The blades are designed in a way to move maximum air without being making a lot of noise.

A very well built card

The rear ports, include a DVI-I, standard HDMI and two miniDP ports. The ports also come with plastic inserts to prevent dust and moisture settling down on the unused ports. You get two CrossFireX connectors for quad CrossFire. Just like the reference card, you need two 6-pin power connectors to power it up.

Features
The Twin Frozr edition from MSI is designed for overclocking, but the card isn’t heavily overclocked out-of-the-box. They’ve only bumped up the core frequency to 880MHz from 800MHz, while everything else is left at stock. MSI leaves it up to the user to tweak the settings, as per their liking through their Afterburner program. This is one of the best utilities out there, when it comes to monitoring your graphics card and tweaking the settings. The R7950 also has overvoltage support, which means you can push the play with the voltages as well for a more stable overclock.

Good set of connectors

The graphics card also boasts of their Military Class III components, which include Hi-C CAP for the GPU, which supplies more precise voltage to the components on the card. The capacitors are of the Japanese solid state type for a longer lifespan. Finally, the card supports all the features found on AMD’s Souther Islands chipset like Eyefinity, DX11, etc.

Testbench

• Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz
• Motherboard: GIGABYTE P67A-UD3R
• Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws 8GB (4GB x 2) @1600MHz
• Hard drive: Intel SSD 520 240GB (Boot Drive), WD Velociraptor 300GB (Secondary Drive)
• GPU: MSI R7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5
• PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit