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The R6950 ships in an attractively designed box with the metal cooler getting much of the focus, as we would expect.
The box opens up into a lovely gatefold presentation, detailing all the technical aspects of the card design. Very nice presentation and certainly a good first impression.
The bundle is comprehensive and contains literature on the range of MSI products, outside the graphics sector. There is also a software disc, power and video converter cables, and a Crossfire bridge.
The Twin Frozr III cooler will be immediately familiar to many regular readers as it uses an all metal design with twin fan implementation. The card is built on a dark PCB and uses a 6+2 phase PWM design.
The card is CrossfireX capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations and it requires two 6 pin PCI power connectors for operation.
The card has two DVI connectors as well as a full size HDMI connector and two mini displayport connectors.
The cooler is easily removed with four screws. It is a sophisticated design which works in conjunction with a PCB plate panel underneath. There is a switch which offers ‘performance' and ‘silence' modes, adjusting the fan speeds.
There are four thick heatpipes connected to the nickel plated copper base, feeding into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side. MSI use Hi-C and Solid Capacitors throughout with Tantalum and Aluminum cores for extra long life, stability and low ESR. They are also using Super Ferrite Chokes with 10% Power Efficiency Improvement and 30% greater current capacity.
The GPUz screenshot highlights the hardware specifications. The MSI card has 1408 unified shaders, 32 ROPS and have 2GB of GDDR5 memory connected via a 256 bit memory interface. The core clock runs at 850mhz and the memory at 1300mhz (5200mhz effective).
Their coolers are really very good, we get a very low return rate on these cards.
Good deal on OCUk for that card. especially with two free, and very tasty games.
The big question is, with AMD about to release a new range of cards (well in a few months at least), is anyone opting for one of these now?
Really good looking card as usual from MSI. I never see them listed in many sites. Do scan even stock them?
I have one of these and its very good. I have problems with overclocking it however and I had hoped you might do better. mine is limited to 910mhz and it crashes 🙁
Quite a sexy card. Can’t wait until MSI will realease TwinFrozr III as retail cooler.
A very good and complete review. Just one question. Due to a discusion on the dutch site hardware.info it became clear that using the latest version of the drivers has a significant effect on the results. I would like to know if the results of the other cards as used in your graphs are also obtained using the same driver versions. If these are older results with older drivers then it might be a good idea to mention the driver version / date with the different test scores for the different cards.
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