MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1G/OC Video Card Review

Temperature Testing

Since video card temperatures and the heat generated by next-generation cards have become an area of concern among enthusiasts and gamers, we want to take a closer look at how the graphics cards do at idle and under a full load.

MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1G/OC Video Card Idle Temperature:

As you can see from the screen shot above, the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1G/OC had power idle states of 250MHz on the GPU core clock, 150.0MHz on the GDDR5 memory. We observed the card to idle at 34C in a room with a temperature of 22C.

We fired up FurMark v1.9.1 and ran the stability test on extreme burn-in mode at 640×480, which was enough to put the GPU core at 100% load in order to get the highest load temperature possible. This application also charts the temperature results so you can see how the temperature rises and levels off, which is very nice. The fans on the video card were left on auto in performance mode during testing.

The MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1G/OC peaked at 63C according to Furmark after five minutes of running Furmark 1.9.1 at a resolution of 640×480 on extreme burn-in mode.

We recorded temperatures during several scenarios on each of the cards we tested today and the benchmark results are shown above. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti video card that we are using has the NVIDIA reference design box cooler and it was clearly beat by the MSI Twin Frozr III and ASUS DirectCU II cooling solutions. The MSI N560GTX-448 and MSI R6950 both use the Twin Frozr III GPU cooler and both cards run the coolest in the tests that we conducted. The MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1G/OC was running in performance mode during testing and the hottest that we could get the card was 63C at full load in Furmark. When running HAWX 2 at 1920×1080 we saw the card peak at 55C after running three loops of the benchmark. The GPU cooler used on this card is clearly one of the selling points as it is quiet and performs well.