MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review

Name: MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review - Page 11
Brand: MSI

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, March 03, 2011, 12:00 PM EDT

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Our power consumption tests revealed some interesting data. Despite having higher clocks and dual fans, the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III actually consumed less power than a reference Radeon HD 6950 under both idle and load conditions. This leads us to beleive the GPU binning done by MSI, in conjunction with the use of more efficient power delivery circuitry on the card, make the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III a bit more "green" than straight-up reference cards.

Tags: MSI, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU, dx11, Twin Frozr

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com