MSI Radeon HD 7870 Hawk Overclocking Gaming Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,033 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of a card that's actually very exciting this is the MSI
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radon 7870 Hawk now if you know anything
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about MSI Hawk edition cards you know basically that they are badass because
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they build they just completely overbuild these cards and they're
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actually not that much more expensive than a regular one now when you factor
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in also that the 7870 is already a terrific value in a great overclocker
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and Hawk edition cards are all about overclocking and not costing that much
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more yes I am very excited about this
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card so comes with a three-year warranty in USA in Canada and Mexico incidentally
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if you live in Vancouver there's a local RMA Depot which is really handy um
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because you just go in and you can basically like walk in instead of uh
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shipping comes with GPU reactor ready for 3D Mark 11 which basically just
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means it's direct X11 card military class 3 concept once again I'm talking
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about over building that's what I mean MSI After Burner up to 85% overclocking
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okay well come on uh MSI after burner software is obviously included and
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supported unlocked digital power so this
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again comes into the overbuilding the card aspect of things here we
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go there's a stealth fighter or bomber
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or something breaking world records with unlock digital power digital okay so
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unlocked BIOS digital pwm controller andh has power design for best
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overclocking stability is top Solution on hd7870 graphics cards I believe it
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based on past Hawk card Experience One
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Click to unlock all the protections including over current protection
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disable Active pH switching higher Catalyst Control Center range and a
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higher power tune range that's awesome remember guys powertune keeps your your
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board within a certain power threshold all reference boards have it from both
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vendors these days for the latest generation products these these power
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throttles that are built into the cards just turn it off fantastic great for
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overclockers digital pwm controller so more stable and precise voltage by
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Digital Signal okay enhanced power design equipped with eight phases for
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the GPU and two phases for memory and one phase for
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vddc military class 3 components including copper mosfets highly
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conductive capacitors golden solid state chokes I don't know that the gold
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coating actually increases performance but it looks cool dark solid capacitors
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with a special coating for anti- rust protection interesting so I guess if
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you're in a fairly humid environment that would be a definite
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Factor okay 3x3 OC kits must have features for extreme overclockers V
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check points Agreed 100% you can use a Multimeter to read the actual values
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triple over voltage must again a total
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must Triple T monitors able to Temp monitor the GPU memory and
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vrm awesome okay what else we got in here dual 8 cm pwm fence superpipe
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technology with 8 mm heat pipes dual formin one heat sinks nickel plated
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copper base propeller blade technology which in theory gives you better air
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flow as well as making dust less likely
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to accumulate in the heat sink so the
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fan spin in reverse on Startup which removes the dust before it actually
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starts cooling it which is very very cool and I've learned to Trust MSI's
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claims with respect to uh thermal performance so they're saying up to 15°
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cooler than a reference and up to 5 DB quieter than a reference uh actually
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that's probably conservative especially when you're overclocking once you start
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overclocking their twin frozer coolers just destroy the reference coolers on
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both the a and the NVIDIA side so in terms of included accessories we've got
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a DBI to VGA adapter two dual Molex to
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six pin PCIe connectors as well as a mini DP to full size DisplayPort
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adapter we've also got our V checkpoint
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pieces so these plug into the V check points on the card and these plug into
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your multimon monitor leads we have okay
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something oh no
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way find the GPU reactor card and have
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the obverse side of the card turned upward as Illustrated to check the
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correct installation orientation first you know what we're going to have to find out more about this GPU
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reactor so GPU reactor basically
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increases the voltage stability and reduces Ripple to the GPU for extreme
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overclocking it is not required for air
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or even water operation but if you want to throw liquid nitrogen or dry ice at
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the problem it's probably recommended to use it we got a driver disc throw away
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that download the latest off the AMD website quick user guide and certificate
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of quality and stability now I've always kind of laughed at these certificates that get included with cards before cuz
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I actually didn't know what steps get thrown into something like military
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class 3 I actually happened to have a slide deck over here that includes all
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of the different tests so there's temperature shock test which is done in a chamber there's the rainy day indoor
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humidity test vibration test low pressure test high temperature test low
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temperature test for liquid nitrogen cooling bam and shock test that is where
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the certificate of quality and stability comes from now that's not to say that
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they take the card and like drop it and that's like that's like a you know
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falling down test no it's more to do with the components that went into the
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card than the actual finished end user product
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itself and of course being a hawk
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Edition card it looks balling out so
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we've got dual 80mm pwm fans once again this is with their dust reduction spin
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the other way for a little bit and then spin this way technology the Shroud is
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made of aluminum looks very very nice we've got a beast looking aluminum
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cooler so you can see it stretches all the way from here all the way past the
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back of the end of the PCB so that is an enormous amount of cooling surface area
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you can see the super pipes here so these are more like normal heat pipes 1
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2 3 the super pipes are at the ends and
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the reason for that is you can see the GPU right there all the heat pipes are
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positioned directly over the GPU itself and these ones are bigger because they
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have to carry heat more efficiently because they're going further away that
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is what's going to make all of the area that the fans cover cool the card as
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effectively as possible so these super pipes go into the thickest area of the
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heat sink that is further away that is right next to the fan so it's getting a
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very significant amount of air flow now the fans don't only cool the GPU itself
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but because there's no barrier between the fins themselves and the card you can
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see clearly that the there is a heat spreader covering the entire card and
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then all of that incidental air flow is going to cool the pwm components the RAM
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you can see the thermal material that is between the memory and the heat spreader
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itself you can also see the goldplated oh wow those look so cool can
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you see that that is awesome slick can you give
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me a OD or a nay slick says yes says
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those are amazing okay just oh man see I'm like I'm like not letting you guys
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look at it cuz like I'm trying to see them better um sorry moving on
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uh so cool okay moving on to the back of
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the board here is the GPU reactor
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thingamabobber right here so it can actually be removed warning be noted
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that any improper installation of GPU reactor card may cause damage to the
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card so okay give me a sec here guys I'm going
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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
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actually turn it either way so if you happen to have like an upside down ATX
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case you could like turn it the other way so that it's still right side up
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MSI oh and there's LEDs in here too so it's going to light up so this is the
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GPU reactor board which as I mentioned
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um increases the stability see they can
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only cram so many components on the back of the GPU itself to have you know to
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control the voltage that goes to the various parts of the chip MSI said no
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not enough we need more so they built this guy right here which uh plugs in so
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you can I hope you guys can see that plugs into those two slots you may want
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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
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cover it up with this thing obviously this thing isn't necessarily um
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Crossfire ready because it makes the back of the card on top of the back plate itself it bulges out a little bit
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more uh so if you were slot to slot then it it wouldn't really work that well but
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as long as you're running a single card or dual cards with lots of spacing that
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is just awesome speaking of which the there's a backplate on the card itself
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so the Aesthetics of it are very very Sleek looking so you can see even the uh
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the heat spreader here over the front of the card the unisync comes out like this
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and just has like a very nice look to it MSI logo on the top this is uses still
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uses dual six pin PCIe connectors remember this is a 28 nanom GPU so it's
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not like it's even in an extreme overclocking scenario you're not going
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to run into the need for more than dual six pins and I'm personally not a huge
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believer that an 8 Pin can deliver that much more power than a six pin in a real
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world scenario on account of it's just two more ground pins um correct me if
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I'm wrong PCI Express 3.0 is of course
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included this is a new generation card a 7,000 series card so that is a given
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although once again I'm not 100% sure that the bandwidth increase is uh
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necessarily that uh significant uh in a
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real world scenario there's our V checkpoint so you use those little
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dongles right there you plug those all in and then you can connect to whichever ones you want to measure your true
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voltages in real time so they're labeled memory PLL and GPU memory PLL and GPU
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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
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through DVI HTMI and two through mini DisplayPort now if you can daisy chain
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them I believe you can support up to something like six displays by doing two
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monitors per DisplayPort but most monitors don't have support for that
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functionality just yet anyway support for Crossfire is limited to two-way
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configurations cuz there is only one crossfire connector and I think that
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pretty much covers it so it comes clocked at 1.1 gigahertz so even though
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it says gigahertz Edition on the box or something like that what they really mean is gigahertz and more Edition this
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is a hot card it is pre-overclocked and comes with ample Headroom for additional
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overclocking thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 7870 hawk Edition and
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