MSI R6870 HAWK (Twin Frozr III Thermal Design) Review

To overclock today, we used MSI Afterburner, which is based around the core Rivatuner code.

Unfortunately V2.0.0 doesn't fully support this hardware, but luckily we managed to get the latest beta direct from MSI which allows for voltage tuning.

This beta (above) allows for three voltage settings to be adjusted. The Core Voltage, Memory Voltage and Auxiliary Voltage. With past experience I have found that increasing the voltage too much can actually have a negative result on the final figures, so be prepared to play about with this for a couple of hours, as every individual card is different.

Our particular sample was a fantastic overclocking board, almost 12% on the core and 15% on the memory clock. This increased Resident Evil 5  engine performance by 7 fps, and Lost Planet 2 in full Direct X 11 mode by 5 fps. Temperatures only rose by 3c under FurMark load, still significantly cooler than the reference design.

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