TechRadar Verdict
Fast and cool, but too expensive just for a cooler card without the extras a vanilla card offers.
Pros
- +
Incredibly cool
- +
Still quick
Cons
- -
Pricey
- -
No dual-BIOS switch
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Things are sure getting crowded out there in the graphics world, with a card hitting just about every price point. Basically no matter what spare change you've got rattling around in your pocket there's a card available for that exact number.
Down to the pennies.
But the £200 mark is currently the sweetspot between price and performance, and the AMD Radeon HD 6950 is the king of that particular roost thanks to its sterling performance and for the fact you can wave your magic BIOS flashing wand and transform it into a AMD Radeon HD 6970 gratis.
MSI's slightly overclocked version is therefore a bit of a difficult sell.
There's only so far you can take an HD 6950 in overclocking terms, limited to a mere 40MHz over the stock clock, so the impressive Twin FrozR II cooling array is slightly redundant.
And it's almost the same price as a faster Radeon HD 6970.
Because of the minute 10MHz overclock on the MSI HD 6950 Twin FrozR II compared to the 800MHz of the standard HD 6950 there is relatively no performance boost.
What the MSI card is doing though is operating 25% cooler than the stock card. That's still no help in terms of HD 6950 overclocking, but if you took the risk and flashed the card's BIOS you stand a decent chance of clocking it well over 900MHz.
DirectX 11 Tessellation performance
DirectX 11 gaming performance
