Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7950 was launched just a few weeks ago and received generally favourable reviews. The Radeon HD 7950 qualifies as being a high-end graphics card due to its pricing, which is comparative to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 with its current market pricing. AMD is aiming at higher energy efficiency compared to its market rival product, and a scope for aggressive cost-cutting, if competition from future NVIDIA product so dictate. In essence, HD 7950 will serve as a fulcrum for both today's high-end price-point, and tomorrow's gamer sweet-spot, again, depending on its competitive environment. This is what makes it an important model for AMD.

Today we have the first review of the MSI Radeon HD 7950 Twin Frozr III.



MSI's new card is based on a customized design of the AMD Radeon HD 7950. MSI has slapped their TwinFrozr III cooler on the card - a thermal design that we have seen before on other cards based on both NVIDIA and ATI.

In addition to a new cooling solution, MSI also changed some minor aspects of the PCB and increased the clock speed of the HD 7950 TwinFrozr III to 880 MHz GPU. Memory remains unchanged at the AMD default of 1250 MHz.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• CrossFire Bridge
• Analog VGA Adapter
• 2x PCI-Express Power Cable
• Mini-DP to DP Adapter

The Card

The cooler of MSI's HD 7950 TF III covers the whole PCB, which seems to be optimum use of given space.


The card requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one full size HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPorts. You may use all the outputs at the same time, thanks to AMD's superior display output architecture.

Please note that all the connectors are on the "first" slot now, which opens up the second one for a cooler grill through which hot air is blown out of the case. This also makes it possible to use the HD 7950 in a single slot configuration with a waterblock to cool the components.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies. The DisplayPort outputs are version 1.2 which enables the use of hubs and Multi-Stream transport.


You may combine up to four HD 7950 and HD 7970 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration for higher framerates or better image quality settings.


Pictured above are photos of the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.