MSI R7870 Twin Frozr 2GD5 Pro Reviews

MSI as you'd expect have put together a really nice HD 7870 that as always stands out for all the right reasons. Combined with the strong Twin Frozr cooler as well, we can see its strong performance helps achieve a really nice overclock that helps boost overall performance. Priced at $369 the MSI HD 7870 Twin Frozr comes in $10 to $20 more than reference clocked cards. While the out of the box overclock is nice, the main feature you're paying for is the cooler and as usual, the Twin Frozr III cooler is worth it for anyone looking for something that is going to perform well. Outside of the video card itself, we can see MSI have put together a nice little bundle here. It's nice to see them include a MiniDP to DisplayPort convertor in the box - something we're seeing more and more companies ignore.

We were positively surprised by AMD's new Radeon HD 7800 Series in our launch day review. Since then nothing has changed. The MSI HD 7870 TF III uses the same reference design PCB, adds a bigger cooler and increases clock speeds. Going from 1000 / 1200 MHz (core/memory) on the reference design to 1050 / 1200 MHz helped the card gain about 2% real life performance over the reference card. I have to admit this difference is quite small and will be barely felt in-game. I wonder why MSI chose such a conservative overclock out of the box - we have seen higher, from other manufacturers. Despite the overclock out of the box, we saw significant additional manual OC potential, up to 1230 MHz, which a good deal higher than the AMD reference design, but again, not the highest we have seen on any HD 7870. Memory overclocking works very well, reaching 1615 MHz, almost standard with today's fast Hynix ICs. Unlike the ASUS HD 7870 DC II, we see almost no power consumption increase on the MSI HD 7870 TF III, over AMD reference design. It uses very similar power, which is only slightly higher in 3D due to the increased clocks.