MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review

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.

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.