MSI R6870 HAWK Breaks Four 3DMark World Records

Ever since MSI launched the first HAWK-series graphics cards a few years ago, these solutions have proven to be quite popular among regular, as well as enthusiast users, and now a HAWK version of the Radeon HD 6870 managed to snag the world record title in no less than four versions of the popular 3DMark benchmarks.

To reach these results, the card had to be overclocked quite severely as it went from its default 900MHz core to a whopping 1,343MHz, which translates into a 46% core frequency increase, while the memory was clocked at 1,317MHz.

Through the entire benching session, the card was cooled using liquid nitrogen which has a boiling temperature of −196 °C.

The rest of the benchmarking system was comprised out of an Intel Core i7-2600K processor that was overclocked to reach 5,572.5MHz, an Asus Sabertooth P67 motherboard and 4GB of Exceleram DDR3 memory, which were run at different settings depending on the benchmark.

The MSI R6870 HAWK uses a custom PCB design which holds an 8+2-phase power supply and comes with what the company calls the “triple over-voltage technology.”

This allows for raising the VMEM and VDDCI voltages along with the VGPU to further improve the overclocking headroom of the card.

Danish overclocker THC noted that “the MSI R6870 HAWK has increased the phase of the power supply to 8+2 phase, allowing me to operate extreme overclocking on the GPU with the huge amount of current required. 

“With MSI's Afterburner triple super-overclocking software, I was able to avoid the risk of damaging the graphics card when making modifications, thus enabling me to effortlessly increase the GPU/memory/VDDCI voltage and break the HD 6870 records for 3DMark05 and 06!”

Outside of 3DMark 05 and 06, THC also managed to take the world record in 3DMark 03 and Vantage and his scores are listed on Hwbot.