The Card

Head on the GTX 560 Ti HAWK looks similar to a lot of other cards we've seen from MSI that carry the Twin Frozr cooler. Unlike the previous GTX 560 Ti we looked at from MSI, though, this one carries the Twin Frozr III cooler instead of the Twin Frozr II. Hopefully it yields some impressive cooling and noise numbers.

Power comes in the form of two 6-Pin PCI-E power connectors at the top of the card and closer to the front we've got a single SLI connector. Across the top of the card we've also got a really nice bracket which is designed to prevent any flex happening in the card.

While we still have our voltage measuring points, they're not located at the top of the card like we're used to. Instead they're located at the back towards the bottom. Most people aren't going to make use of this ability, but as always we show you where it is.

Connectivity comes in the form of two Dual-Link DVI connectors and a single mini-HDMI port. As we mentioned on the previous page, MSI have been kind enough to include a mini-HDMI to HDMI connector in the bundle.

Specifications

Something that surprised me was that MSI have been quite aggressive with the out of the box clocks on the card. The core has been bumped to 950MHz from the default 822MHz. This also means the Shader clock has been bumped from 1644MHz too 1900MHz.

As for the 1GB of GDDR5 memory, that's also been bumped slightly from 4008MHz QDR to 4200MHz QDR.

Of course, like we normally do with the HAWK and Lightning cards, we overclock. What we ended up with was 1020MHz on the core which pushed the Shader clock to 2040MHz. As for the 1GB of GDDR5, that got pushed to a round 4400MHz QDR.