MSI R6870 HAWK (Twin Frozr III Thermal Design) Review

1. Introduction2. MSI R6870 HAWK3. Testing Methodology4. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark5. Synthetic: Stone Giant Benchmark6. Synthetic: Tessmark7. Synthetic: ShaderToy8. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: 3DMark 1110. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.011. Gaming: Alien V Predator12. Gaming: Far Cry 213. Gaming: Resident Evil 514. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 215. Gaming: Mafia 216. Gaming: Lost Planet 217. Technical: Thermal Dynamics18. Technical: Acoustics Performance19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Technical: Overclocking21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

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

The HAWK is supplied in a distinctive box with a picture of their stealth fighter plane, which is representative of this particular range.

The box is a gateway design which opens up to reveal a detail list of specifications and design implementations as well as the product itself, visible through a plastic window in the center.

The bundle contains literature on the product as well as a software disc, full colour information guide along with power and video converter cables. There are also V-Check point cables which can be used in conjunction with a MultiMeter to read GPU, memory and VDCCI voltage values.

The card is reminiscent of other HAWK cards we have reviewed in the past. The large aluminum cooler covers the whole PCB.

The cooler is an impressive design, with a series of 5 thick heatpipes splitting into two arrays of aluminum fins on other side, with two propeller style fans directly cooling each section.

The top of the card features three connection points (or V-Check points) which allows the user to hook up a MultiMeter directly to analyse the GPU, Memory and VDCC voltage readings. The card can also be set up into a Crossfire configuration.

The card offers dual DVI x2 connectors, an HDMI out and two mini displayport connectors. There is also a switch to allow for two fan speed settings, one ‘performance' mode, and the other ‘silent' mode.

The R6870 HAWK is powered by two 6 pin PCIe power connectors.

Once the cooler is removed, we can get a full view of the fantastic engineering quality implemented. MSI are using Hi-C Cap (Tantalum core) with extremely high conductivity and 15x less leakage. This is apparently the same material which is used on Space Shuttles. MSI are also utilising Super Ferrite Chokes with 10% better power efficiency and 30% higher current capacity. This can aid the overclocking capabilities.

Today we are using one of our Core i7 970 Intel systems, which is liquid cooled and overclocked to 4.33ghz.

Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.3ghz
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65 (MS-7522)
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10
Power Supply: Corsair Ax1200
Memory: 6GB GSkill Performance Gaming ram @ 902.9 MHz (2:10) @ 7-8-7-24
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)
Monitors: Dell U2410 UltraSharp, LaCie 730, Iiyama Prolite E2472HDD x2

Other graphics cards for comparisons:
nVidia GTX460 OC (740 core)
AMD HD6950
AMD HD5870
AMD HD6870
AMD HD6850
AMD HD5850

Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Catalyst 11.1
Forceware 263.58 WHQL
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
TessMark
ShaderToy
HQV 2.0 Software

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter

Games:
Alien V Predator
Far Cry 2
Resident Evil 5
Tom Clancy HAWX 2
Mafia 2
Lost Planet 2

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We test at 1080p so that all video cards can be compared throughout our reviews. Obviously driver updates might enhance performance slightly over time, but as a rule, its a useful way for us to present the findings.

The R6870 HAWK manages to push past the reference card by a single frame per second, almost in line with the HD5870 from the last generation. The minimum frames per second is noticeably higher however.

Stone Giant is a benchmark tech demo that showcases and measures DirectX 11 performance using the BitSquid Engine. This is a very heavy tessellation dependant benchmark which runs very well on nVidia hardware.

The additional core speed helps the HAWK climb to a performance level next to the HD5870 with an average of 37 frames per second.

TessMark, is small synthetic graphics benchmark focused on Tessellation performance of Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4 capable cards.

Like Unigine Heaven, TessMark allows to select the level tessellation. The small difference is that TessMark proposes four differents levels:

• moderate
• normal
• extreme
• insane

Moderate and normal levels are levels we’ll find in real world applications like games. Extreme and insane levels are reserved for GPU’s with much tessellation processing power. We tested today with moderate, normal, and extreme settings to get an indication of the tessellation scaling with each card.

The MSI R6870 HAWK puts in a good showing, outperforming all other AMD branded solutions on test today.

ShaderToyMark is an OpenGL benchmark, developed with GeeXLab, and focused on pixel shaders only.

In the words of the author … Why ShaderToyMark? Simply because I recently played with the pixel shaders available with Shader Toy, a great WebGL tool for testing GLSL shaders. And I said to myself: that would be nice to see several of these shaders running at the same time in the same 3D window… ShaderToyMark was born.

The contributors of Shader Toy are all famous demomakers and their shaders are real gems. It’s just amazing to see what can clever people do with some sin/cos and other math tricks.

The MSI R6870 Hawk delivers a solid 31 frames per second, the same as the HD5870 and a couple of frames above the reference clocked card.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

The moderate overclock helps the R6870 push past the reference card by around 200 points.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The overclocked R6870 manages to almost equal the HD5870 from the last generation, falling short by around 100 points. The HD6950 leads the way by a considerable margin with this Direct X 11 based benchmark suite.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here.

	MSI R6870 HAWK
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

The image quality with this hardware and the latest Catalyst 11.1 drivers is exceptionally high, scoring 196 points out of a possible 210.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparible throughout reviews.

The Alien V Predator Direct X 11 engine is still taxing, even for modern day hardware, however our results show that the HAWK card manages to keep the frame rate at 27 frames per second or higher at all times throughout our testing.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

With the latest AMD hardware, this engine runs exceptionally well, with all cards on test today capable of pushing very smooth frame rates, even with 8AA at ultra high/high settings.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

The Resident 5 Direct X 10 engine has always been a top performer with AMD graphics hardware and we can see that the HAWK fits into second place in the performance stakes, right behind the HD6950.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe.

We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum.

This particular engine is very well optimised for nVidia hardware, as we can see from the results – the GTX460 OC model is leading the pack by a considerable margin. Regardless, all solutions can maintain good frame rates with this title at our resolution and IQ settings.

Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta, the son of Sicilian immigrants. As the game progresses, Vito will join the Falcone Crime Family and become a made man. There are 15 chapters in the game, connected into one storyline.

We tested at 2560×1600 with fullscreen: on, antialiasing:on , Anisotrophic filtering: 16x, Shadow Quality: High, Ambient Occlusion: on, Geometry Detail: High and APEX PhysX: off.

With physX disabled, all of the cards can hold the frame rate at 25 or above throughout our testing environment. The HD6950 is the top scoring card in this particular test.

Lost Planet 2 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition which is also made by Capcom, taking place ten years after the events of the first game, on the same fictional planet. The story takes place back on E.D.N. III 10 years after the events of the first game. The snow has melted to reveal jungles and more tropical areas that have taken the place of more frozen regions. The plot begins with Mercenaries fighting against Jungle Pirates.

After destroying a mine, the Mercenaries continue on to evacuate the area, in which a Category-G Akrid appears and attacks them. After being rescued, they find out their evacuation point (Where the Category-G appeared) was a set-up and no pick up team awaited them. Lost Planet 2 runs on the MT-Framework 2.0, an updated version of the engine used in several Capcom-developed games.

We are testing in DX11 mode with all settings on maximum. Direct X 11 features are also set to high.

Lost Planet 2 is a demanding Direct X 11 title, even if the game fails to excite. This is another nvidia friendly title which is indicated by the performance from the GTX460 OC solution. The HD6950 is the top performer followed by the HD5870.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 23c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

The custom Twin Frozr III is an extremely efficient design, massively outperforming the reference solution, and even Sapphire's Toxic Cooler which we reviewed last week. Temperatures with the quiet fan profile are 4c higher when under full load.

Return to ambient is a feature we have recently added to our reviews … we measure the time it takes for a solution to return to idle temperatures, immediately after full load. The faster the time, the better the cooler – for example a Noctua NH D14 cooler will return an Intel processor to idle temperatures much faster than a reference cooler. This is a good indication of how quickly a heatsink can dissipate heat.

A twin fan design generally helps with return to idle performance, and the Twin Frozr III cooler design is one of the best in this respective field. Using the quiet fan mode lowers this performance time to around 21 seconds.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

This card is a very quiet card when gaming, with a reading generally between 34 and 35 dBa depending on the GPU load. Using Furmark pushes the card to its theorectical limits, just above 38 dBa. A great set of results for the fan design. Using the quieter fan mode drops the dBa by 1.5dBa when under load.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. The best way to get maximum load results is by using Furmark, and even though it is not indicative of a real world situation it shows the limits the card can theoretically demand. The ‘gaming’ results are measured when playing Crysis Warhead and is a more valuable result to take from this.

When idle, the card consumes only 17 watts, and when gaming this rises to around 125 watts. It is a very efficient design.

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.

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.

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