MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review

Name: MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review - Page 12
Brand: MSI

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

We also spent some time overlcocking the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III using MSI’s own Afterburner tuning utility. If you haven’t tried afterburner, we definitely recommend giving it a shot—MSI supports many of today’s most popular GPUs with Afterburner, and they don’t have to be MSI branded cards either.

It turned out we were able to crank Afterburner’s GPU and memory clocks up to their maximum values of 900MHz for the GPU and 1325MHz for the memory and still maintain stability. These are only modest gains over the R6950 Twin Frozr III’s stock clocks, but they’re much higher than a reference Radeon HD 6950.

Also note the GPU temperature and fan speed in the graphs above. After loading the GPU fully with a couple of benchmarks, you’ll see the fan speed increased only slightly, yet the GPU temp never went above 63’C (that's close to 20'C lower than the stock reference card we tested at launch). The MSI Twin Frozr III cooling setup works extremely well on this card—temperatures are excellent and it is nice and quiet.

Overclocking The MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III

Pushing Clocks Even Higher

While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of high-resolution benchmarks to see what kind of performance increases were to be had. The increases weren’t huge, but the 50MHz bump in GPU clock and 25MHz bump in memory clock definitely pushed framerates a bit higher than stock, as would be expected.

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