Today we are looking at a rather special card from MSI, the R6870 HAWK Edition with the new Twin Frozr III Cooler. With a 8+2 Phase PWM design and a dual fan speed profile switch connected to a new propeller blade design we have high hopes that this will be one of the finest 6870's we have tested at KitGuru.
The HD6870 has been on the market for quite some time now and it has been a strong seller for AMD, targeting the lucrative sub £200 price point. In recent months AMD partners have been working hard to push this specific model to new performance levels while dropping the emited noise as far as possible.
The R6870 HAWK Edition is supplied in a preoverclocked state with the core running at 930mhz and the memory at 1050mhz (4200mhz effective). The new Twin Frozr III Cooler is a dual fan system formed around a high density aluminum heatsink with Nickel Plated Copper Base.
MSI R6870 HAWK | AMD HD6870 | AMD HD5870 | |
Die Size (mm2) | 255 | 255 | 334 |
Transistor Count | 1.7 billion | 1.7 billion | 2.15 billion |
Memory Bandwidth | 4.2Gbps | 4.2GBps | 4.8GBps |
Stream Processors | 1120 | 1120 | 1600 |
Texture Units | 56 | 56 | 80 |
ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 |
Core Clock | 930 mhz | 900 mhz | 850 mhz |
Memory Clock | 1,050mhz | 1,050mhz | 1,200mhz |
Memory | 1GB GDDR5 | 1GB GDDR5 | 1GB GDDR5 |