MSI's HD 6950 Twin Frozr II is the first custom design HD 6950 card to reach our labs. Due to what seems to be a restriction from AMD side, the card comes with an overclock out of the box of only 10 MHz - such a small increase is not noticeable in actual gaming. Overclocking potential is increased when compared to the AMD reference design, part of this achievement is due to the slightly higher GPU voltage in 3D, which also has the effect of increasing power consumption slightly.
While the AMD reference design had a Volterra voltage regulator and a dual BIOS switch, MSI has chosen to go without the switch and a CHiL voltage regulator. The CHiL controller is supported in MSI's excellent overclocking software Afterburner, so this shouldn't be a problem. When we tried to unlock the additional shaders to turn this card into a HD 6970, we were out of luck. It seems the ASIC on our test sample has the shaders properly locked, so a BIOS mod is not possible. Whether this is the case for the HD 6950 Twin Frozr II production cards is unknown at this time.
Pricewise, MSI's card comes at a hefty premium of $30, I'm really having a hard time finding anything that could justify that price increase, other than the visual difference from the Twin Frozr II cooler, which delivers slightly improved temperatures but not much else.