Now with twice the frozr-ey goodness!
We'll kick this off by wondering out loud just exactly what a Frozr is, and why this card needed two of them. Well we still don't know, but when MSI sent us a single card that claimed to have twice the Frozr of other cards we've looked at, we leapt at the chance to find out for ourselves.
The MSI GTX275 Twin Frozr OC graphics card is a mouthful built around the GT200 core at 55nm with 240 stream processors, and 896MB of GDDR3 memory on a 448-bit memory bus. It's slightly overclocked from reference clocks on both the core and memory; this isn't a huge increase, and it should hopefully leave us with some headroom later on to do our own pushing. The GT200 core is a physically massive chip, but electrically it demands quite a lot of power, which is supplied through the two PCIe 6-pin power connectors.
This card looks pretty funky at first glance, with a giant curved aluminium plate the very first thing your eye falls upon as you pull it out of the packaging. It's got two 80mm fans with slightly translucent blades, though these aren't lit by LEDs. Under the hood the Twin Frozr's running a giant aluminium plate that mounts directly to the core, where a series of five nickel-plated copper heatpipes work together to take the heat away from the core as fast as possible. They're threaded equidistantly throughout the heatsink and no one area felt warmer or cooler than another, a very good sign that this heatsink is doing just what it's designed to do. The standard aluminium fins provide the actual cooling surface, and heat escapes around all sides of the card directly into the case. Extruded aluminium heatsinks on either side of the main core mounting plate also cover the memory and power regulation, extending the length of the cherry-red PCB.
We couldn't find anything approximating a Frozr, but whatever they are both of them seem to keep the card very cool at 36 degrees idle and 56 load with a constant noise of 61.3dBA. This is set a little loud for our liking, but thanks to the 4-pin PWM cable you can easily mess around with it yourself with software like Rivatuner. The Frozrs helped us overclock this card a little too, bumping the core up to 738MHz on the core (plus eleven per cent) and 1280MHz on the memory (ten per cent up). Insofar as overclocks go this is pretty good, though certainly nothing extraordinary.
Performance in games and benchmarks was pretty good; churning through GRID like tomorrow was already yesterday, ripping through Crysis faster than a kid opens an N64 at Christmas and beating 3DMark benchies faster than a chef can whip up a cake.
Sadly this card is very light on bundle, only including cables and driver CD with no game. It's not very much expense to add a game in, but considering this card is already about a hundred bucks more expensive than a reference GTX275 you need a little extra something to justify that price leap - and even two Frozrs isn't quite enough.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012