welcome to my unboxing of a card that's actually very exciting this is the MSI
radon 7870 Hawk now if you know anything
about MSI Hawk edition cards you know basically that they are badass because
they build they just completely overbuild these cards and they're
actually not that much more expensive than a regular one now when you factor
in also that the 7870 is already a terrific value in a great overclocker
and Hawk edition cards are all about overclocking and not costing that much
more yes I am very excited about this
card so comes with a three-year warranty in USA in Canada and Mexico incidentally
if you live in Vancouver there's a local RMA Depot which is really handy um
because you just go in and you can basically like walk in instead of uh
shipping comes with GPU reactor ready for 3D Mark 11 which basically just
means it's direct X11 card military class 3 concept once again I'm talking
about over building that's what I mean MSI After Burner up to 85% overclocking
okay well come on uh MSI after burner software is obviously included and
supported unlocked digital power so this
again comes into the overbuilding the card aspect of things here we
go there's a stealth fighter or bomber
or something breaking world records with unlock digital power digital okay so
unlocked BIOS digital pwm controller andh has power design for best
overclocking stability is top Solution on hd7870 graphics cards I believe it
based on past Hawk card Experience One
Click to unlock all the protections including over current protection
disable Active pH switching higher Catalyst Control Center range and a
higher power tune range that's awesome remember guys powertune keeps your your
board within a certain power threshold all reference boards have it from both
vendors these days for the latest generation products these these power
throttles that are built into the cards just turn it off fantastic great for
overclockers digital pwm controller so more stable and precise voltage by
Digital Signal okay enhanced power design equipped with eight phases for
the GPU and two phases for memory and one phase for
vddc military class 3 components including copper mosfets highly
conductive capacitors golden solid state chokes I don't know that the gold
coating actually increases performance but it looks cool dark solid capacitors
with a special coating for anti- rust protection interesting so I guess if
you're in a fairly humid environment that would be a definite
Factor okay 3x3 OC kits must have features for extreme overclockers V
check points Agreed 100% you can use a Multimeter to read the actual values
triple over voltage must again a total
must Triple T monitors able to Temp monitor the GPU memory and
vrm awesome okay what else we got in here dual 8 cm pwm fence superpipe
technology with 8 mm heat pipes dual formin one heat sinks nickel plated
copper base propeller blade technology which in theory gives you better air
flow as well as making dust less likely
to accumulate in the heat sink so the
fan spin in reverse on Startup which removes the dust before it actually
starts cooling it which is very very cool and I've learned to Trust MSI's
claims with respect to uh thermal performance so they're saying up to 15°
cooler than a reference and up to 5 DB quieter than a reference uh actually
that's probably conservative especially when you're overclocking once you start
overclocking their twin frozer coolers just destroy the reference coolers on
both the a and the NVIDIA side so in terms of included accessories we've got
a DBI to VGA adapter two dual Molex to
six pin PCIe connectors as well as a mini DP to full size DisplayPort
adapter we've also got our V checkpoint
pieces so these plug into the V check points on the card and these plug into
your multimon monitor leads we have okay
something oh no
way find the GPU reactor card and have
the obverse side of the card turned upward as Illustrated to check the
correct installation orientation first you know what we're going to have to find out more about this GPU
reactor so GPU reactor basically
increases the voltage stability and reduces Ripple to the GPU for extreme
overclocking it is not required for air
or even water operation but if you want to throw liquid nitrogen or dry ice at
the problem it's probably recommended to use it we got a driver disc throw away
that download the latest off the AMD website quick user guide and certificate
of quality and stability now I've always kind of laughed at these certificates that get included with cards before cuz
I actually didn't know what steps get thrown into something like military
class 3 I actually happened to have a slide deck over here that includes all
of the different tests so there's temperature shock test which is done in a chamber there's the rainy day indoor
humidity test vibration test low pressure test high temperature test low
temperature test for liquid nitrogen cooling bam and shock test that is where
the certificate of quality and stability comes from now that's not to say that
they take the card and like drop it and that's like that's like a you know
falling down test no it's more to do with the components that went into the
card than the actual finished end user product
itself and of course being a hawk
Edition card it looks balling out so
we've got dual 80mm pwm fans once again this is with their dust reduction spin
the other way for a little bit and then spin this way technology the Shroud is
made of aluminum looks very very nice we've got a beast looking aluminum
cooler so you can see it stretches all the way from here all the way past the
back of the end of the PCB so that is an enormous amount of cooling surface area
you can see the super pipes here so these are more like normal heat pipes 1
2 3 the super pipes are at the ends and
the reason for that is you can see the GPU right there all the heat pipes are
positioned directly over the GPU itself and these ones are bigger because they
have to carry heat more efficiently because they're going further away that
is what's going to make all of the area that the fans cover cool the card as
effectively as possible so these super pipes go into the thickest area of the
heat sink that is further away that is right next to the fan so it's getting a
very significant amount of air flow now the fans don't only cool the GPU itself
but because there's no barrier between the fins themselves and the card you can
see clearly that the there is a heat spreader covering the entire card and
then all of that incidental air flow is going to cool the pwm components the RAM
you can see the thermal material that is between the memory and the heat spreader
itself you can also see the goldplated oh wow those look so cool can
you see that that is awesome slick can you give
me a OD or a nay slick says yes says
those are amazing okay just oh man see I'm like I'm like not letting you guys
look at it cuz like I'm trying to see them better um sorry moving on
uh so cool okay moving on to the back of
the board here is the GPU reactor
thingamabobber right here so it can actually be removed warning be noted
that any improper installation of GPU reactor card may cause damage to the
card so okay give me a sec here guys I'm going
to try and figure out how to do this sorry I just had to press a little bit harder so what's cool is you can
actually turn it either way so if you happen to have like an upside down ATX
case you could like turn it the other way so that it's still right side up
MSI oh and there's LEDs in here too so it's going to light up so this is the
GPU reactor board which as I mentioned
um increases the stability see they can
only cram so many components on the back of the GPU itself to have you know to
control the voltage that goes to the various parts of the chip MSI said no
not enough we need more so they built this guy right here which uh plugs in so
you can I hope you guys can see that plugs into those two slots you may want
to make sure you don't put it on wrong cuz I'm sure that would deliver all the wrong voltages everywhere and then you
cover it up with this thing obviously this thing isn't necessarily um
Crossfire ready because it makes the back of the card on top of the back plate itself it bulges out a little bit
more uh so if you were slot to slot then it it wouldn't really work that well but
as long as you're running a single card or dual cards with lots of spacing that
is just awesome speaking of which the there's a backplate on the card itself
so the Aesthetics of it are very very Sleek looking so you can see even the uh
the heat spreader here over the front of the card the unisync comes out like this
and just has like a very nice look to it MSI logo on the top this is uses still
uses dual six pin PCIe connectors remember this is a 28 nanom GPU so it's
not like it's even in an extreme overclocking scenario you're not going
to run into the need for more than dual six pins and I'm personally not a huge
believer that an 8 Pin can deliver that much more power than a six pin in a real
world scenario on account of it's just two more ground pins um correct me if
I'm wrong PCI Express 3.0 is of course
included this is a new generation card a 7,000 series card so that is a given
although once again I'm not 100% sure that the bandwidth increase is uh
necessarily that uh significant uh in a
real world scenario there's our V checkpoint so you use those little
dongles right there you plug those all in and then you can connect to whichever ones you want to measure your true
voltages in real time so they're labeled memory PLL and GPU memory PLL and GPU
okay let's have a look at the back of the card so it supports up to four displays right out of the box two
through DVI HTMI and two through mini DisplayPort now if you can daisy chain
them I believe you can support up to something like six displays by doing two
monitors per DisplayPort but most monitors don't have support for that
functionality just yet anyway support for Crossfire is limited to two-way
configurations cuz there is only one crossfire connector and I think that
pretty much covers it so it comes clocked at 1.1 gigahertz so even though
it says gigahertz Edition on the box or something like that what they really mean is gigahertz and more Edition this
is a hot card it is pre-overclocked and comes with ample Headroom for additional
overclocking thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 7870 hawk Edition and
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