MSI R5830 Twin Frozr II review - Introduction

MSI R5830 Twin Frozr II graphics card tested

One of the companies that has received increased media coverage here at Guru3D is MSI, for many good reasons. Next to their regular products they have a development team in the VGA division consistently brewing on new ideas, implementations trying to push to the outer limits of quality. Over the past, say 18 months, things have changed a lot for MSI as their products where lifted from mostly reference design based products to a series of graphics cards with customized PCBs, special coolers, the world's best overclocking software allowing not just core and memory frequency overclocks, but also voltage adjustments. They stepped it up a notch alright.

So next to the regular products, you have read up on Lightning editions, HAWK editions, pretty much gear catered for the more enthusiast end-user. End yep .. you guessed it right, that would be the Guru3D.com audience.

Today's product is based on the new Radeon HD 5830. MSI again made sure that their version needed to be interesting, so they designed a custom PCB, used durable quality components and then added their latest Twin FRoZr II cooler. The end result is a product that looks just awesome, performs at baseline level, but overclocks just really well.

The Radeon HD 5830 is positioned in-between the Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon 5850. A product that would cost roughly 250 USD and performance wise would sit in-between the aforementioned graphics cards. So here's what ATI did, they took the sweet Radeon HD 5850, disabled three shader clusters and fooled around with the clocks a little.

Have a peek at what we test today and then head on over to the next page, where we'll look at the MSI R 5870 Twin FroZR II edition graphics card.

It's quite a looker alright ...