The Card

The latest HAWK offering utilizes the Twin FrozrIII cooler which is the latest version of the Twin Frozr cooler. It's a dual fan setup and packs a bunch of heat pipes which can be seen towards the bottom of the card. It's only a dual slot cooler, so running two of these bad boys shouldn't cause any problems on most motherboards.

Across the top of the card we've got three highlights; the back offers two 6-Pin PCI-E power connectors, while towards the middle of the card we've got three little connectors where you can plug in those cables we mentioned on the previous page. As we said, they allow for you to grab the voltage of the AUX, Memory and GPU when combined with a volt meter.

Closer to the front we've got a single Crossfire connector which means we're able to only run up too two of these cards together.

Connectivity on the HAWK consists of two DVI connectors; one Dual-Link, one Single-Link, a single HDMI port and two mini-DP ports.

Specifications

A reference HD 6870 will carry an out of the box core clock of 900MHz and the 1GB of GDDR5 will come in at 4400MHz QDR. While MSI have chosen to leave the memory clock alone, they've bumped the core up slightly to 930MHz. These cards are designed to be overclocked, though.

Firing up MSI Afterburner and bumping the GPU, Memory and AUX voltages all up, we managed to achieve a really nice overclock which can be seen below.

What we ended up with was a core of 1057MHz which is a big jump from that default 900MHz clock, while memory came in at a whopping 5020MHz QDR which is a very nice increase from that 4400MHz QDR memory clock that you get at default.