MSI R7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5/OC Pro Reviews

Folks with the ability to spend £300-plus on their next graphics card need to take a good look at the GeForce GTX 670 from NVIDIA and Radeon HD 7950 from AMD. These two premium GPUs offer solid performance and features at a price, albeit steep, that's at least 15 per cent lower than the best single-GPU cards'. Recent price cuts have pushed Radeon HD 7950 pricing down to £300. Spend an extra £20 and the MSI R7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5/OC can be yours. Equipped with a better cooler and shipping with a 10 per cent hike in the core clock, there's plenty of headroom in the GPU, as shown by our overclocking tests. Benchmark numbers also show the card to perform well at a 1080p resolution though, with our maximum in-game quality settings, not so great when tasked to run three screens. But factor in the quiet operation and class-matching power consumption and we'd only just give the nod to a regular GTX 670, especially if you don't mind tinkering with a little overclocking on this Radeon HD 7950 GPU.

When AMD released their HD 7000 series of cards, they had a pretty hefty lead on the competition. These cards outperformed the then current NVIDIA cards at every price point, but a lot of people were dismayed that AMD was not more disruptive of the price/performance curve with this new generation of chips. The previous high end HD 6970 was introduced at a $399 price point, but the new HD 7970 was given a $549 MSRP. That is a pretty significant increase when talking about a last gen top end card to a new one. I guess we should have expected this type of pricing considering the performance advantage that AMD had at the time. Make hay when the sun shines, right?

Let’s start things off with the Gigabyte WindForce 3X since it embodies every positive aspect of the HD 7950’s new price and then goes a few steps further. Normally a manufacturer-based overclock of just over ten percent wouldn’t be enough to turn heads and it certainly isn’t sufficient to boost performance by noticeable amounts but the higher clock speeds are paired up with one hell of a cooling solution. Gigabyte has always been near the forefront of heatsink technology and the WindForce 3X has once again proven it is one of the best designs around. We’ve also seen the beginnings of a small price war break out between AMD’s board partners and as a result you can get this card for $399. Let’s say that again for emphasis: the WindForce 3X OC doesn’t cost one penny more than a reference-based HD 7950. To us, that makes it a phenomenal value. MSI’s HD 7950 Twin Frozr III may not boast a core clock of 900MHz but a mere 20MHz shortfall really won’t make all that much of a difference in-game. Like the WindForce 3X its heatsink design is one of the best around, resulting in a cool running core and a near silent acoustical profile. The big difference is one of cost. The Twin Frozr III OC is a good $15 more expensive so even though both solutions are on a relatively even footing, MSI is in a bit of a tough position here. From our perspective, their card really isn’t worth more than what Gigabyte is offering. However, from an anecdotal perspective, MSI does have several RMA centers spread throughout North America (including one in Canada) so turnaround times should be better than what Gigabyte offers.

MSI's custom design Radeon HD 7950 comes with the company's well-tested Twin Frozr III cooler that we have seen on many other cards before. The new dual-fan thermal solution provides greatly reduced temperatures and fan noise when compared to the AMD reference board. Compared to PowerColor's HD 7950 PCS+, the noise level is higher, but the temperatures are a bit lower. Personally I'd rather have less noise, than temperatures going from 70°C to 60°C (which has no effect other than the numbers being smaller in your monitoring app). In terms of performance, the HD 7950 TF III delivers about 5% higher real-life performance than the AMD reference design, thanks to the increased GPU clock speed of 880 MHz (vs. 800 on the reference design). Unfortunately memory has seen no clock increase, which would have been easy to do - there is lots of overclock headroom with memory.