With the Twin Frozr Gaming GTX 780 OC Edition, MSI has launched a rather interesting graphics card. Equipped with the companies powerful Twin Frozr cooler and an attractive price tag, this sound like a great offer. Already now we’re really curious to find out what’s you get from this card.
A while back, MSI has launched its new Gaming series which includes both motherboards as well as graphics cards and today we have a chance to take a look at one Gaming series member, the Twin Frozr Gaming GTX 780 OC Edition. As the name suggests, the aforementioned graphics card is not only the member of the MSI Gaming series but also comes with MSI’s quite famous Twin Frozr cooler and since it is an OC Edition graphics card, also works at factory-overclocked settings. In case you missed MSI’s Gaming series products earlier, these are all based on the red/black color scheme and the Twin Frozr Gaming GTX 780 OC Edition is not an exception. While MSI’s Lightning series is the cream of the crop, the Gaming series is definitely not bad either, and we certainly hope that Twin Frozr Gaming GTX 780 OC Edition will justify that.
As you can see from the above picture, the Twin Frozr Gaming GTX 780 OC Edition uses the new B1 revision of the GK110 chip. Therefore it was a simple decision to go for higher factory overclocking than on the standard model but the manufacturer didn’t push things too far and decided to go for an average factory-overclocking on the new card we’re testing here. While the reference GeForce GTX 780 GPU is set to work at 863MHz for the base clock and 900MHz for the Boost clock, the new MSI Twin Frozr Gaming GTX 780 OC Edition works at 902 MHz for the base clock and 1’006 MHz for the Boost clock.
Unfortunately, no factory overclocking was done on the 3GB of GDDR5 memory that remains at recommended 1’502 MHz (6’008 MHz effective).
While the typical Boost clock is set at 954 MHz, the maximum Boost of 1’006 MHz was achieved quite easily and the Twin Frozr Gaming GTX 780 OC Edition held that clock most of the load time due to good custom cooler as well as good TDP target (Nvidia’s Boost technology being based on both temperature and power on this card, the latter being predominant). The GPU Max. Boost clock only dropped in Furmark down to 849 MHz at 1.012 V because of the power target, while the temperature was at 72°C. We did not experience any throttling in the games tested games, the GPU was always running at 1’006 MHz, more than 50 MHz above the advertised Boost clock.
| Gigabyte 780 GHz | MSI Twin Frozr Gaming GTX 780 OC Edition | Gigabyte 780 OC V2 | GeForce GTX 780 | |
| Chip | GK110-300-B1 | GK110-300-B1 | GK110-300-A1 | GK110-300-A1 |
| Process | 28 nm | 28 nm | 28 nm | 28 nm |
| Transistors | 7.10 billion | 7.10 billion | 7.10 billion | 7.10 billion |
| GPU clock | 1’020 MHz | 902 MHz | 954 MHz | 863 MHz |
| GPU Boost clock | 1’072 MHz | 1’006 MHz | 1’006 MHz | 900 MHz |
| Memory GDDR5 | 3’072 MB | 3’072 MB | 3’072 MB | 3’072 MB |
| Memory clock | 1’502 (6’008) MHz | 1’502 (6’008) MHz | 1’502 (6’008) MHz | 1’502 (6’008) MHz |
| Memory interface | 384 Bit | 384 Bit | 384 Bit | 384 Bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 288’400 MB/s | 288’400 MB/s | 288’400 MB/s | 288’400 MB/s |
| Shader Cores | 2’304 (12 SMX) | 2’304 (12 SMX) | 2’304 (12 SMX) | 2’304 (12 SMX) |
| TMUs | 192 | 192 | 192 | 192 |
| ROPs | 48 | 48 | 48 | 48 |
| PCB Type | Custom Design | Custom Design | Custom Design | Reference Design |
| Lenght (PCB – Total) | 26.9 cm | 26.9 cm | 26.9 cm | 27.0 – 27.0 cm |
| Height (PCB – Total) | 11.8 cm | 11.8 cm | 11.8 cm | 11.0 – 11.0 cm |
| Slots | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Cooler | WindForce 3X 450W | Twin Frozr IV | WindForce 3X 450W | NVIDIA Reference |