14 DAY TRIAL // MSI's Hawk line of graphics cards has managed to leave a good impression to overclockers everywhere, so many enthusiasts will rejoice when hearing that the company has just released the R6870 Hawk which is based on the Radeon HD 6870 GPU and features the same unique design and cooling solution that made the series famous.
Compared to the other solutions based on AMD's graphics core, the Hawk uses a custom PCB as well as a new cooling solution which promises to deliver temperature up to 21 degrees lower than the reference design.
And we tend to believe it, as the large heatsink that covers the whole card ,draws the heat away from the graphics core via five heatpipes, two of those measuring a full 8mm in diameter (MSI calls them SuperPipes).
In addition, the base is made out of nickel platted copper and the heat is driven away from the heatsink by two 80mm fans with should be a full 7 dBA quieter (at load) than the reference solution.
The improved cooling system is accompanied by a custom designed PCB that features an 8+2 phase power design, compared to the 4+1 phases used on the reference version of the HD 6870, active phase switching (APS), for automatic phase control, as well as all ferrite chokes and solid capacitors.
Voltage can be measured thanks to the integrated read points and MSI even allows its customers to disable the over current protection (OCP) technology that AMD introduced in the HD 6000 series graphics cards.
Along with all the other improvements, the operating frequencies have also been increased, MSI R6870 Hawk running the core at a conservative 930MHz while the memory is set at 1050MHz.
The Radeon HD 6870 GPU is based on AMD's Barts architecture and carries 1120 Steam processors, 56 texturing units, 32 ROPs as well as a 256-bit memory bus.
Pricing has not been disclosed until now, but in Europe the MSI R6870 Hawk is available for about €253.