MSI Adds Twin Frozr II HD 5850 and HD 5870

Micro-Star International had a lot of things on display at this year's CeBIT Expo in Hanover, Germany, among which there was also a pair of graphics adapters that had received the company's proprietary Twin Frozr II cooling system. Now, the graphics card and motherboard maker seems to have decided that the world is ready to welcome its devices and has made the official announcement of the customized HD 5850 and HD 5870.

The two cards will obviously support DirectX 11 and CrossFireX, as is the case with pretty much all new graphics cards from the HD 5000 line. The 1GB GDDR5 HD 5850 will have GPU and memory clocks of 725MHz and 4000MHz respectively, whereas the HD 5870 will have the GPU clocked at 850MHz and the 1GB GDDR5 running at 4800MHz. Both will connect via DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.

Unlike all other devices that use the Twin Frozr II cooling system, these two particular models are not going to be part of the Lightning Series. Still, they boast the main features of MSI's high-quality products, including military-class components. These features significantly increase the reliability of the products, with the Hi-c CAP capacitors being able to boast of having a lifespan 8 times longer than that of solid-state capacitors. In addition, the Solid State Choke design and the Solid CAP capacitors increase stability, reducing crashes and delays that normally occur because of overheating or long-term operations.

Coming to complement the endurance provided by military-class design, the Twin Frozr II cooler uses four heatpipes (two of which being 8mm SuperPipes) to lead heat away from the GPU and into the heatsink, which is then cooled off by a pair of 80mm fans. MSI claims that this solution keeps the card cooler by 12°C compared to the reference models.