MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II Pro Reviews

MSI's GTX 560 Twin Frozr II OC is a solid overclocked variant of the GeForce GTX 560. It comes with a nice clock increase that helps the card gain 5% real life performance over the GTX 560 reference design. Considering that MSI's card is 5% more expensive than the reference design, the pricing seems justified. In addition to the performance improvements you'll receive MSI's TwinFrozr II cooler which does a good job at keeping the card cool. In idle the card is very quiet, under load it does get quite noisy though. Since the card runs at 72°C under load it seems that MSI has prioritized temperatures over noise in their BIOS configuration. Personally I'd rather see 80°C on a quieter card which would still be perfectly safe with tons of temperature headroom for overclocking and voltage tuning. MSI's implementation of the GTX 560 presents a decent factory-overclocked deal that propels the GTX 560 close to HD 6870 performance level, and closer to the GTX 560 Ti.

MSI's Twin Frozr II/OC, priced at around £215, warrants its £20 premium by issuing an out-the-box operating speed of 880MHz and a dual-fan Twin Frozr II cooler that's really rather good. Offering the lowest GTX 560 Ti temperatures we've ever seen, the card's cooling capability is second to none and noise levels aren't far behind NVIDIA's exemplary reference design. MSI's chosen overclock of 880MHz for the core and 4,200MHz for memory is conservative, but couple that with an excellent cooler and ample overclocking potential, and you get a mighty-impressive package at a little under £215.

We feel strongly that MSI has done an excellent job building a video card around the GeForce GTX 560 Ti GPU. MSI’s Twin Frozr II heatsink and fan combo does exactly what it claims to. We are impressed with the temperature of this video cards At idle we had a low GPU temperature, and more importantly at full load temperatures were in the lower 60 degrees Celsius for the GPU. This is incredible, and will help the lifetime of your video card as well, plus give you some headroom for overclocking. The added high quality components used also help ensure long life and stability.

In terms of performance, the MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II OC was no match for the Gigabyte and Galaxy cards, but its cooler was effective and overclocking performance was decent as well, almost on a par with the faster Gigabyte and Galaxy cards. The best thing about it, however, is that at US$249 it costs only about as much as reference cards. As a whole, this is probably a more well-rounded card of the lot.

With three retail NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti offerings behind us, we know that picking one is going to be a difficult choice for some. Some users will really want the highest out-of-the-box overclocked settings and that would be where the Palit Sonic offering falls. Others will want the coolest running card and the MSI Twin Frozr II design definitely takes the win there. Galaxy's card offers some great temperatures as well as a unique "spin" on the fan design with a fold-out feature that allows for easy cleaning. All three cards are overclocking competitively with each other in our testing so if you are able to use some tweaking software you'll likely be able to put all three of these cards on an equal playing field. MSI and Galaxy also take the edge in pricing - a $20 gap can be pretty tempting when it comes to graphics cards in the price range.

Almost any GTX 560 Ti card is going to get high marks at this stage of the game. NVIDIA has brought some pretty amazing performance improvements to a graphics platform that was already very competitive. AMD has responded with some serious price cuts on the HD 6870 and released a value version of the HD 6950 that will bracket the GTX560Ti in price, but as of today I think this is the card to beat in the $250 price range. One reason for that is the continued presence of serious overclocking headroom for this upgraded GPU. I got 975 MHz on the core clock with very little effort, and the Twin Frozr II cooler kept the temperatures below 61C no matter how hard I stressed the card with continuous benchmarking. I had to work hard to come up with some Cons for this card, and none of them would probably influence my buying decision. This is a video card I can recommend without reservation.

The Twin Frozr II version of the GTX 560 doesn't leave us with the same wow factor we got from the first card we looked at, but that aggressive price tag, fantastic cooling performance and OC potential make the model look good nonetheless. Out of the box you're going to have a good card. The fun's going to really begin, though, when you fire up MSI Afterburner and start to overclock that bad boy - A slightly different take on the GTX 560 Ti when compared to the first one we did. The good news is that MSI have aimed to make the card run cool and quiet, and they've achieved that.

The card was a great little overclocker, and when overclocked, it offered a huge performance boost. The Twin FROZR II not only performed well, it performed cool. That being said, I would have liked to see the card's cooler perform just a bit better. The card was equipped with MSI's military grade components and comes with a free copy of 3DMark 11. Despite the card having such a large dual fan cooler, I was pleased to find out that it wasn't all that loud. In fact, at 86% max speed, the fan was almost inaudible. Users with loud case fans would have to go to a great deal of trouble to hear the GPU's fan. All-in-all I'd recommend this card to any mid- range to high-end user. I can do this because the card is priced extremely well and offers a huge amount of performance.