buy an Intel knock barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game
items for Planet Side 2 click now to learn more now I know there's been a lot
of high-end graphics card stuff lately and we've focused a lot on $500 $600
cards that most people can't afford now it's time to come back to reality so
with the recent price drops especially GTX 760's are looking pretty appealing
and I can't think of many that are better than MSI's Hawk Edition so it's
clocked at 1.76 GHz it's got 2 gigs of 6 GHz gddr5
memory just like pretty much any other GTX 760 would and it has a very unique
implementation as we've come to expect from Hawk cards over the last several
years so let's go ahead and get this baby opened up and find out what's
inside so first we've got some accessories which hopefully I can figure
out how to actually open here there we go so there's a quick users guide as
well as a disc that you should throw away a DVI to VGA adapter that you
should throw away the checkpoint connectors so those are for checking
actual voltages right on the PCV using the V checkpoints as well as apparently
a guide and some oh cool these are handy two six pin to 8 Pin PCI Express
adapters those are going in the handy stuff bin after this all right so after
that we have the card itself so it supports all the standard GTX 760 stuff
so G CPU Boost 2.0 dynamically adjusting the clocks according to power thresholds
temperature thresholds and making sure that the fan speed stays under control
game stream which is with any Kepler card the ability to stream your games
from your PC to an NVIDIA Shield or to
well to an NVIDIA Shield or through your TV or to your TV through an NVIDIA
Shield so that's game stream and Shadow play which uses the onboard h264 encoder
to record your games locally or stream to twitch.tv with almost no performance
hit although it should be noted that not all games are supported yada yada etc
etc but it's a great way to stream games as long as they are supported um versus
having there be a huge performance drop all right so let's talk about the cooler
right there my friends are two 100 mm fans with their propeller blades so they
have that smoother plastic on the outside they spin the other way upon
startup to pull dust out of that massive cooler so that's actually a five heat
pipe cooler there's four of them that come out the bottom so you can see those
four down there and then there's an additional super pipe on the top so
that's an 8 mm heat pipe that carries heat as far away from the GPU core as it
possibly can towards the back of the card They are claiming it runs up to 10°
C cooler and up to around 16 DB quieter and while we were able to validate that
it does run dramatically cooler than a reference card we don't have a deel
meter unfortunately so we weren't able to validate that it runs quieter but it
does run extremely quietly so I wouldn't be concerned about this card being low
on the top you find two 8 Pin PCI Express connectors I would go ahead and
say that that's probably totally unnecessary but that does in theory
allow this card to draw more power therefore delivering more power to the
GPU and other components and in theory overclock better in fact we did get a
slightly better overclock out of the GTX 760 Hawk compared to our reference card
which you'll see in the overclocking results and benchmarks at the end of
this video on the back of the card we find a back plate I kind of I kind of
you know was not that sold on back plates for a while but I think I've
started liking them again they look quite nice and this is kind of a first
for MSI it's the first time I've seen it but a matte black PCB the PCB on this
card is absolutely gorgeous we've seen a lot of dark brown pcbs trying to pass
for Black pcbs from MSI and that is not what they've done here there's a bio
switch right here that goes from standard mode to liquid nitrogen mode
depending on what kind of crazy bench marking you're doing on it and they've
completely redesigned the entire PCB so
it has a 6 Plus 2phase power design that is to say six phases for the GPU itself
two phases for the RAM and nothing left of the original reference design it's
got a PCI Express 3.0 16x connector down
here it has two SLI fingers at the top supporting up to three-way SLI and then
over on the io side you got two DVI ports HDMI and DisplayPort so that's
full support for NVIDIA 3D Vision surround with one additional auxiliary
display it uses military class four
components so that means driver mosfet so that's a driver and a mosfet in one
unit and then they've also got their copper mosfets for faster dis heat
dissipation High SE caps and finally
they're dark caps which are aluminum capacitors they're claiming up to a
10year lifespan or something ridiculous like that software-wise it supports
their triple over voltage feature so you know they have a few cards that they
kind of slip under the envidia green light sort of you know blanket of not
not too much overvolting and all that stuff so you can overv
the GPU the RAM as well as the PLL so
you can really fine-tune your overclock and that's all supported through MSI
After Burner which around here at Linus Tech tips is our favorite NVIDIA GeForce
graphics card overclocking utility remember you can use MSI After Burner on
any graphics card as long as it doesn't have a weird vrm Solution that's not
supported by it so not just on MSI cards although if you want to support the guys
that build great utilities then you might want to buy an MSI card so that
you know that all those good things can happen all right so performance we used
our standard test bench with our six core processor 12 gigs or 16 16 gigs of
RAM I think are running on it these days some SSD and uh anyway here are the
Benchmark results so you can see here that our 760 Hawk Edition does slightly
outperform our standard card all of this while in my personal opinion looking
absolutely fantastic being extremely quiet and running extremely cool we only
ran a few games because there's not really a whole lot to say about it it
should be noted guys that we do overclock all of our cards so at stock
this card will outperform the reference card by a little bit more but once you
overclock both of them the Gap does tend to narrow a little bit if you aren't doing anything extreme on the cooling
side or the overclocking tweaking and tuning side remember guys overclocking
is always luck of the draw so there's no guarantee that your Hawk will overclock
better than a standard card or that your standard card will overclock at all but
it tends to be that the better designed cards with beef your vrm and more power
and all that stuff do tend to overclock a little bit better one more thing I missed here at the back of the card
those are those V checkpoints so you can actually check the exact voltages of
various components with a multimeter rather than relying on software tools
and I think that is pretty much it thank you for checking out my unboxing and
review of the GTX 760 Hawk Edition from MSI don't forget to subscribe to lus
Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked
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