Incredible performance of HAWK series.. The card looks promising... I hope they have long enough warranty for the enthusiasts to mod them more like crazy..
It is quite interesting to see that there is an extensive shift towards the more high-end and enthusiast products in the past year or so. It seems that next to good performance and features, the end-users like to tweak more and more as well. Well that and they want the "good stuff". MSI is exhibiting that on all fronts, with their motherboards but of course also with their graphics cards.
And even when a graphics card is segmented in the mid-range .. they know precisely how to pimp it up in order to bring you a very attractive product at an okay price. Yeah, rock-solid designs with no compromises at all. In that context MSI just released their
HAWK edition Radeon HD 6870 graphics card and well, the only thing left original is the actual GPU as everything else was changed.
It doesnt end there though, MSI is pre-overclocking this 1024MB HAWK model towards 930 MHz. And then theres the overclock potential, a new voltage regulation circuitry was embedded, allowing not only to play and tweak around with GPU voltages, nope ... they added voltage control for the memory and Auxilary/PLL voltage as well.
As a result this graphics card can get overclocked to 950 MHz easily, and if you apply a little voltage tweaking with the help of Afterburner, 1 GHz is without doubt a threshold you can pass. All in all definitely something you want to check out.
Within its own lineup the Radeon HD 6850 will be faster than the Radeon HD 5830 and the Radeon HD 6870 will be faster than the Radeon HD 5850, but not faster than the 5870 . The Radeon HD 6870 will be a pure reference product, while the Radeon HD 6850 will see many custom designs and boards. In the end it will be all about pricing of course.
Lets have a quick comparative overview of some of the specifications representing a certain cope of mid-range performance products.
Theres no way around it, the R6870 HAWK is a very impressive product. See, the reference R6870 all by itself is obviously already a great value product that offers good performance. MSI upped that up a notch by the (though petit) standard overclock.
The HAWK however is not about that shy standard overclock, its about build quality, sturdy and cool looks and sure, the exemplary cooling. The new TwiNFrozr III cooler definitely managed to impress me. With the help of a little switch you can setup the silent or performance mode and yeah, the card even at the performance mode switch remains silent while keeping GPU temperatures below 65 Degrees C under full load, thats just good.
Combined with the latest revision of MSI AfterBurner you can tweak the card much further though. Without voltage tweaking youll reach say 950~975 MHz on the graphics processor core. But really, when you buy a card of this caliber and do not apply even a little extra voltage on the GPU, well it would be a shame really. At 1.25V you will be able to pass that 1 GHz barrier, in fact we reached 1044 MHz on the GPU completely stable. Small tip, if you decide to tweak with added voltages, please bare in mind that you should only increase the voltage when needed.
We got the gDDR5 memory clocked (effective data-rate) to 4800 MHz stable as well. These two tweaks ensure you gain another chunk in performance.
The HAWK as such is an exemplary product in many ways, the problem with it is the recent price drop and introduction of the R6950 1GB, you can purchase that product at 230 EUR already, and thats the same price as the HAWK. At default that product is at least as fast or slightly faster and that might hinder the HAWK as GPU specs wise, the 6950 1GB is simply more advanced. But as you have been able to see, performance wise youll have noting to complain about, pretty much any game up-to 1920x1200 will run just fine with a decent set of image quality preferences enabled. The R6870 is a nice success story, and the HAWK brings it a level higher.
If you can find the MSI R6870 HAWK for the right price, we can wholeheartedly recommend the product. The sheer design and quality components alone make this an awesome product, and is something that the more tweaking and enthusiast crowd will like very much.
Definitely recommended for your average hardware tweaker.
Source: http://www.guru3d.com/article/msi-radeon-6870-hawk-review 
