Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
MSI has a terrific card in their hands with the R7950 TwinFrozr III. And that is not surprising as the reference product already is really good. The sheer design of the MSI card is nice with it's dark and grey theme. The default overclock at 880 MHz works out really well also. This brings the card actually very close to the R7970 in terms of performance.
The TwinFrozr III cooler works out really well with the R7950. The temperatures are pretty impressive at roughly 60 Degrees C under full load. Whist doing that the card remains virtually inaudible, which is a huge plus as well. Yeah where we found the TWinFrozr II cooler a little noisy on certain product, the TwinFrozr III cooler just works out incredibly well.
Now we have to mention pricing of course, and for the entire R7900 series the danger lies in the price really; if MSI can keep this card at say 400 EUR / 450 USD, then we think that would be a good balance of the performance versus features. But right now we see prices slightly higher overall for the 7900 series.
So let's sum things up. The MSI R7950 TwinFrozr III model is a fairly inaudible graphics card, temperatures stay at roughly 60 Degrees C under load which is quite wonderful. Power consumption as well impressed us, with the GPU at 100% load our X58 Core i7 based AMD test PC was consuming roughly 300W. When we input the variables and reverse calculate the TDP, we end up at a score of roughly 140W~150W for this card, and that's notable.
Gaming wise obviously you will not have anything to complain either, all modern games play perfect up-to at least 1920x1200 and higher. The 3GB memory is grand, but realistically only comes into play once you start to setup Eyefinity with at least three screens, as that's where memory starts to matter.
When you look at the overall package, performance, the new Eyefinity updates, PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all other stuff then we can only conclude that we happily embrace the Radeon HD 7950 in the enthusiast graphics card arena.
The default factory overclock at 880 MHz for the MSI R7950 TwinFrozr III model is significant enough to make a difference. At that clock speed the product sits smack down in the middle of the R7950 and R7970 reference models. It doesn't stop there though, you can tweak much much further.
With the latest Beta update of AfterBurner you can apply a voltage tweak. We did so and put the GPU at 1.25V. The result of it all was a GPU that could be clocked stable towards 1167 MHz and that's 367 MHz above the reference baseline. Impressive as once again there seems to be massive headroom for overclocking just like it's big brother, the Radeon HD 7970. You'll find out that running the graphics memory in the 6000~6300 MHz range is not an issue either.
Admittedly we have been pushing it and are borderline stable. So you might need to back down to 1100 MHz. But still we expect to hear a lot of your success stories in terms of overclock and tweak experiences in our forums. Mind you that overclocking per card can differ. You might even end up at 1000 MHz and some will even end at 1200 MHz.
The product as released by MSI and as tested today works out well. It has all the variables to become a successful product, we do need to observe first how the price level will work out though. 
The performance level is excellent and more then enough for the enthusiast gamer with a monitor up-to 1920x1200, and much like the reference model we still have a smile on our face when we look at its low power draw. If you game at 1920x1080/1200 then this is a product we can very much recommend. Good performance, good looks with a nearly inaudible product. Pricing remains a little icky, but that aside the MSI R7950 TwinFrozr III definitely managed to impress .
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