MSI R6870 HAWK (Twin Frozr III Thermal Design) Review

The MSI R6870 HAWK is an extremely capable card and we think the Twin Frozr III cooler is quite possibly the best on the market. Those readers who follow our content regularly will remember that we reviewed the Sapphire HD6870 Toxic Edition last week. This card was able to maintain gaming temperatures at 67c while only generating 35.4 dBa of emitted noise. The R5870 Hawk has outperformed this card by reducing the gaming temperatures to a staggering 59c while only generating 34.7 dBa of emitted noise.

Gaming performance is great, and while some of the more demanding engines can tax the card at high resolution with the eye candy cranked, generally we found no problems at all with Direct X 10 and Direct X 11 performance. Certainly if you want to game higher than 1080p then we suggest you might look at aiming further up the AMD range, but for the majority of people reading this, the R6870 will easily power through all your game engines.

The overclocking prowess of this design is fantastic, helped dramatically by MSI offering three separate voltage adjustments via software. We were able to get the core to 1040mhz and the memory to 1205mhz (4820mhz effective). Very commendable results indeed.

When looking at the MSI R6870 HAWK as an ‘out of the box' package, we are a little bewildered as to why MSI didn't overclock the card higher. Sure, you can manually do it yourself, but they could easily have supplied this at the same clock speeds as the Sapphire HD6870 Toxic Edition (970mhz core/1150mhz memory).

We have yet to get confirmed pricing, but we would expect MSI to charge around £20 more than the reference HD6870, which would make this a fine value for money purchase. The card emits less noise, generates less heat and overclocks like hell. Its hard to ignore, and this should be on the shortlist right up there with the Sapphire HD6870 Toxic Edition, which is faster out of the box, but overclocks to very similar levels.

KitGuru says: Another mighty fine HD6870, this time from MSI.

Become a Patron!