The MSI Twin Frozr has been a solid design that has only improved over time to a point where it’s hard to see how MSI are going to improve it from here. This is a cooler that can remain quiet under load and even stop when the GPU is idle or undertaking minor gaming duties.
The twin 10cm Torx fans are stronger but generate even less noise (advertised as ~5% less noise) than the Twin Frozr IV. They only spin when they need to and they work independently. On system start up, both fans will spin, then once we were in windows, the right fan would stop, then the left would stop. Periodically whilst idle, once would tick over for 20-30 seconds in a silent flutter.
There is an LED MSI logo with the gaming dragon. It’s a white LED so it’s as design agnostic as MSI could get considering the black and red highlights of the heat sink shroud.
As we saw with the MSI GTX 980, the Twin Frozr has beastly SuperPipes in the cooler to deal with the TDP of the GPU. MSI has their special SuperSU architecture of SuperPipes and regular heat pipes connected and shaped to maximise the benefit from the airflow.
The Twin Frozr V is an impressive cooler. In general use it was basically inaudible and kept the GPU under 69C for all testing including extended overclocking. The impressive thing was the audio profile of the twin fans being so low. Our Corsair HX850 power supply made more noise than the cooler in the benchmarks and gameplay testing.
MSI Afterburner & the MSI Gaming App
MSI Afterburner is our go-to application for graphics card tweaking and we use it for all of our graphics card testing. It’s included in the software bundle but you can download it free from the MSI website.
The Gaming App is basically a set of pre-sets for clock speed (Gaming/Overclocking/Silent), with options to tweak the LED effects and colour options for Eye rest, Gaming, and Movie watching.
Packaging
The packaging is sturdy and the card came well protected in custom cut out foam with red silicon covers over the outputs and PCIE connector. There is a box of accessories including:
- Driver CD
- DVI-VGA Dongle
- Reference Guide
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As usual for MSI Gaming series cards, it has a premium feel about it. This card is heavy, weighing in at 943g and although the cooler isn’t overly wide or long, it feels solid and well built. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the back plate also adds weight to the card but with increased rigidity and heat dissipation potential compared to graphics cards without a back plate.
