Product Listing

Exclusive: MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition - Power Overwhelming

By Kenny Yeo - 1 Mar 2011

Test Setup & Results

Test Setup

To evaluate the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition, we’ll be using our X58 setup with the following specifications:

  • Intel Core i7-975 (3.33GHz)
  • Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
  • 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 G.Skill memory in triple channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows 7 Ultimate

Since the basic performance of the Radeon HD 6950 SKU has been established in our original Radeon HD 6900 series article and we've also furthered that with a Radeon HD 6900 CrossFire performance article, we've decided to cutback on the number of tests for this card rather than running the usual suite of benchmarking tests.

Since the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition is touted for its overclocking ability, we’ll be following what we did in our MSI R6870 Hawk review, and present results of the card running in its highest overclocking state so see just how much more performance you can squeeze out of it. We managed a pretty decent overclock of 960MHz at the core and 5200MHz DDR for the memory.

Apart from raw performance, we are also interested to see just how effective the third-generation Twin Frozr III cooler is.

The list of cards tested and their driver versions used:

  • MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition (Catalyst 11.2)
  • AMD Radeon HD 6970 2GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.11)
  • AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.11)
  • AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.12)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1560MB GDDR5 (ForceWare 262.99)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 1280MB GDDR5 (ForceWare 263.09)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 266.56)

The list of benchmarks used are as follows:

  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage?Futuremark 3DMark 11
  • Crysis Warhead
  • Far Cry 2
  • Battlefield Bad Company 2
  • Hawx 2

 

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8.0
  • Performance 8.5
  • Features 8.5
  • Value 8
The Good
Reasonably quick out of the box
Decent overclocking performance
The Bad
Pretty pricey
No voltage check points
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