Way back at the beginning of this review I said that the MSI HD 7870 Twin Frozr III could be mistaken for being a sheep in wolfs clothing. While it isn't exactly the raging, crazed, blood thirsty animal we hoped for, it can hardly be described as a sheep. It's fast. It's quiet (for the most part). It's cool. The three ingredients that usually make for a graphics card gold award winner here at Vortez. The caveat remains though in that it is not much cheaper than a HD7950 which is based on the more powerful Tahiti pro processor and has an extra GB of GDDR5 to play with. So for £20 more you could have a faster card - on paper at least.



Because the MSI HD7870 we reviewed today arrives as an 'OC edition' it has an extra 50MHz on top of the reference 1000MHz afforded by AMD. This however is a conservative clockspeed as we managed to pull a further 100MHz from the core and 117MHz on the memory. These clockspeeds consistently placed the overall performance of the MSI HD 7870 Twin Frozr III past that of a reference HD7950 which is no mean feat. The problem the HD7870 has of course is that the HD7950 will also overclock very well, turning the tables once again. It could be argued that not every MSI HD7870 will overclock to these speeds. What can be guaranteed is that you will strugle find any other cooler that can offer better cooling performance. It is worth mentioning that with the fan manually raised past the 50% mark it does get a little 'whiney' but thanks to the cooling properties a slight adjustment to the fan profile should ensure the noise never raises above that of a mouse breaking wind at 40 paces!


So we have come full circle. The MSI HD7870 is a powerful card, of that we cannot argue. It cut through our benchmarks with ease and can certainly hold it's head high with regard to the flagship cards. It's quiet, one of the quietest cards we have tested and it is also one of the coolest. When you consider that the card, with a slight overclock can surpass the perfmance of the GTX580 then it may seem like steal. The issue remains however that at £20 shy of £300 it is still an expensive proposition to make when for £20 more you could have a HD7900 series card and in this sector of the market, bang per buck means everything. So in this respect, the MSI HD 7870 Twin Frozr III OC Edition is crippled somewhat. It is too expensive for a mid-range card, not quite powerful enough for a high end GPU.

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net. Thanks to MSI for providing today’s review sample.