MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition OC review - Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The Radeon HD 6950 remains to be a card with mixed feelings, and I'm really talking about the actual AMD GPU here, not the card as designed by MSI. If you take a pre-overclocked R6870 like the HIS R6870 ICEQ TurboX we injected in all benchmark charts today and then compare it to reference R6950 performance, you'll not notice that the vast majority of test runs are not far off from each other performance wise. As such the R6950 GPU sits smack down in-between the mid-range and high-end segment really. There is of course the advantage of the extra nicely sized 2 GB framebuffer.

And once you start overclocking the R6950 that GPU stats to make a little more sense. And especially with the GPU plastered onto a board design like shown today with the R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition, things make even more sense. See, this card has 2GB of graphics memory tucked away in it. That means it's a definitely a little more future proof. Combine that with a nice tweak and sure, you got a nice classic in your hands.

MSI shines with the overall design, the nice but still shy factory overclock, the custom designed PCB has serious quality components harbored on it. The 'Military class' component usage is not a joke, MSI follows the specs and guidelines of military grade hardware, so when you peek at the Ferrite core chokes, Hi-c Capacitors and solid capacitors, you'll know they'll last a long time. It's as simple as that.

The new Twin Frozr revision III cooler is much better than it's predecessor, the Twin Frozer revision II. In idle the card is very silent, under full load .. well you can hear it but that's it really. Meanwhile at its baseline clock frequency we maxed out at 63 Degrees C, which is absolutely a lovely temperature.

When we overclocked towards 1008 MHz on the graphics core and fired off a voltage of 1.25V at it, then under stress we peaked at 70 Degrees C. What that tells us is that the Twin Frozr revision III design wise can take a proverbial kick in the nuts, it has a lot of cooling reserve and capacity.

And that sums up this product really, it's a R6950 with lots and lots of reserves. You are the master of your tweaking experience, MSI provides you the hardware to manage that. Gaming at 1920x1080 will be a breeze for this card, combined with the highest image quality settings of course.

While the R6950 is not the most popular high-end graphics GPU, the MSI design makes up for a lot. We spotted the product as tested today for 250 EUR in the stores and whether or not the 20 EUR extra is worth this design overhaul to you is your choice. We think it's money well spent over that reference design alright and as such we can highly recommend it.

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