MSI Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 TwinFrozr III Graphics Cards Announced

Together with Asus, Gigabyte, HIS, Sapphire and other AMD AIB partners, MSI also announced the launch of two new graphics cards based on the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 designs, both of these new solutions coming with an improved cooler and higher than stock frequencies.

The more powerful of the two MSI video cards launched today is the R7870 TwinFrozr III, which is based on the Pitcairn XT GPU.

Just as its name implies, the graphics card utilizes MSI’s proprietary TwinFrozr III cooling system that packs 8mm thick nickel-plated copper heatpipes to convey heat drawn directly from the GPU to a large aluminum fin array, ventilated by two 80 mm fans.

According to MSI, this makes its creation 15 degrees Celsius cooler and 9dB quieter than AMD’s reference design, and also allows for the GPU to be overclocked to 1050MHz from its standard 1GHz clock speed.

Moving on to its smaller sibling, the R7850 TwinFrozr III, this is built using a shorter PCB and leaner version of the TwinFrozr III cooler.

Unlike the R7870 TwinFrozr III, the R7850 relies on just three heatpipes for drawing the heat produced by the AMD Pitcairn Pro graphics core installed, but this hasn’t stopped MSI from increasing the GPU clock of the card over AMD’s specifications.

As a result, the R7850 TwinFrozr III runs at 900MHz, which is 40MHz higher than AMD’s 860MHz reference clock.

MSI hasn’t specified the prices of any of these two Radeon HD 7800-series solutions, but this was to be expected since the cards won’t go into retail until March 19.

However, these shouldn’t be much more expensive than AMD’s recommended pricing of the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850, which is set at $350 and $250 (265 and 190 EUR), respectively.

Both AMD Radeon HD 7800-series graphics cards were made official by AMD earlier today and are based on the company’s new Graphics Core Next (GSCN) architecture, which made its debut in the Radeon HD 7970.