MSI's HD 5830 Twin Frozr II is an interesting mix of features and the potential to become a great SKU, with a few stumbling blocks along the way. The Twin Frozr II cooler is potent mix of performance and aesthetics that gives the card a sleek yet industrial look. Despite having two fans to do the job of cooling, Twin Frozr II ends up with pleasant fan noise levels when idling. It starts to get noisier in load. In the end it keeps the GPU cool enough, and that goes a long way in helping its overclocking potential. Speaking of which, the MSI HD 5830 Twin Frozr II has nice overclocking headroom. The 20% overclocking on the GPU and 14% on memory gives you a handy 19% performance boost, which goes on the show that the Radeon HD 5830 scales well in performance with increase in clock speeds. The bundled MSI Afterburner software, while helped jump the measly CCC Overdrive clock speed limits, couldn't give us software voltage control it claimed to offer.

With performance in general, the Radeon HD 5830 misses the sweet-spot it set out to achieve, nothing wrong with MSI's implementation as such. It faces stiff competition from three fronts: 1. the previous-generation Radeon HD 4890, which is significantly faster than it at any given resolution, and is available much cheaper than it; 2. the Radeon HD 5770 upper-mid range graphics card that is just 12% slower, while being way cheaper at just $160; and 3. with just another $30, you get the Radeon HD 5850 at $299, which is a solid 30% faster. While the HD 5830 is intended to be a $230-ish SKU, its value proposition is further aggravated by MSI's pricing of $270. Overall we don't have many qualms with the way MSI designed the HD 5830 Twin Frozr II, the card gives decent performance for full-HD resolutions, but at $270 there are so many other options that you can explore - and maybe profit from.