MSI N680GTX Twin Frozr 2GD5 Pro Reviews

MSI's GTX 680 TwinFrozr III uses NVIDIA's GTX 680 reference PCB, but improves on it by coming with MSI's own Twin Frozr III cooling solution pre-installed. GPU clock speed has also received a little bump, up to 1058 MHz base clock, which gives the card a 3% real life performance boost averaged over all our testing. The new TwinFrozr III cooler does an excellent job keeping the card at low temperatures. We see the best temperatures of all GTX 680 cards, including heavily customized triple slot designs. Fan noise is lower than NVIDIA's reference design, too, but other custom GTX 680 cards do a better job here. Price-wise MSI is asking a hefty $50 price premium for their GTX 680, bringing the total to $550. Even at that price the card is out of stock in most shops. Given that the GTX 680 TwinFrozr III is a GTX 680 reference design, with a relatively small overclock out of the box and custom cooling, I find $550 a bit steep, something like $530 would have been more reasonable. Nevertheless, GTX 680 is an awesome card and MSI's GTX 680 Twin Frozr III is so, too.

It was going to be hard for the MSI GeForce GTX 680 TwinFrozr 2GB to disappoint us. We're in love with the new GTX 680 GPU from NVIDIA which offers us some amazing performance and the TwinFrozr series from MSI never disappoints us. Combine those two together and you end up with an awesome video card. The cooler is clearly the stand out for the card, though, and you can see why. Coming in cooler than the reference card when we've overclocked this one so high is what makes the cooler so great. To then throw in those strong noise levels into the mix and you're just in a win-win situation. The only area that lacks for the MSI GTX 680 TwinFrozr 2GB is the bundle with not a whole lot going on. This is something we've been talking about for a while, though. More and more companies are choosing to shrink the bundle down when it comes to these higher end video cards. If you also look at it at the same time, there's not much more that MSI could've thrown into the mix thanks to the fact that the card utilizes a full size DisplayPort connector instead of the mini version we see on AMD cards.