Introduction

Being a mid-range model the recently released Radeon HD 7800 series from AMD has seen partners release own design models extremely quickly with most companies offering upgraded cooling and overclocks come launch day.

Today we're looking at a HD 7870 from MSI and it falls into the popular Twin Frozr series which has always stood out as a strong series thanks to the excellent cooling solutions on offer. The move to a 28nm fabrication process on the latest line up of HD 7000 series cards, though, means that we're seeing coolers perform better than ever.

Today it's time to see if the Twin Frozr can help follow the recent trend and perform strong on the HD 7870. Because we've already looked at a couple of overclocked HD 7870s, though, and the MSI one uses the Twin Frozr cooler we'll be checking out the overclocking capabilities of the video card using MSI Afterburner.

Before we look at the performance, though, there are a few things we need to do. First we'll start off by checking out the bundle that MSI has put together. Once we've done that we'll move onto the card itself, have a quick look over it and then check out both the default clocks of the card and what clocks we got out of it via overclocking.

Once we've done that we'll move onto the performance side of things to see just what the overclock brings to the table while also seeing how the cooler handles it. First let's quickly go over the bundle, though.

Package

You can see we've got a flap that opens up and not only reveals what the card looks like and some of the main features that are on offer, but we also see the TweakTown Best Overclocking Award logo along with a quote.

As for the actual bundle there's not heaps going on like most cards these days it seems. We've got the normal line up of paperwork alongside a driver CD. We've also got two dual Molex to 6-Pin PCIe power connectors, CrossFire bridge and a MiniDP to DisplayPort connector.