MSI GeForce GTX 760 Hawk Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,445 words · ~7 min read
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buy an Intel knock barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game
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items for Planet Side 2 click now to learn more now I know there's been a lot
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of high-end graphics card stuff lately and we've focused a lot on $500 $600
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cards that most people can't afford now it's time to come back to reality so
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with the recent price drops especially GTX 760's are looking pretty appealing
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and I can't think of many that are better than MSI's Hawk Edition so it's
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clocked at 1.76 GHz it's got 2 gigs of 6 GHz gddr5
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memory just like pretty much any other GTX 760 would and it has a very unique
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implementation as we've come to expect from Hawk cards over the last several
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years so let's go ahead and get this baby opened up and find out what's
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inside so first we've got some accessories which hopefully I can figure
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out how to actually open here there we go so there's a quick users guide as
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well as a disc that you should throw away a DVI to VGA adapter that you
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should throw away the checkpoint connectors so those are for checking
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actual voltages right on the PCV using the V checkpoints as well as apparently
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a guide and some oh cool these are handy two six pin to 8 Pin PCI Express
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adapters those are going in the handy stuff bin after this all right so after
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that we have the card itself so it supports all the standard GTX 760 stuff
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so G CPU Boost 2.0 dynamically adjusting the clocks according to power thresholds
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temperature thresholds and making sure that the fan speed stays under control
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game stream which is with any Kepler card the ability to stream your games
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from your PC to an NVIDIA Shield or to
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well to an NVIDIA Shield or through your TV or to your TV through an NVIDIA
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Shield so that's game stream and Shadow play which uses the onboard h264 encoder
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to record your games locally or stream to twitch.tv with almost no performance
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hit although it should be noted that not all games are supported yada yada etc
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etc but it's a great way to stream games as long as they are supported um versus
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having there be a huge performance drop all right so let's talk about the cooler
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right there my friends are two 100 mm fans with their propeller blades so they
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have that smoother plastic on the outside they spin the other way upon
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startup to pull dust out of that massive cooler so that's actually a five heat
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pipe cooler there's four of them that come out the bottom so you can see those
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four down there and then there's an additional super pipe on the top so
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that's an 8 mm heat pipe that carries heat as far away from the GPU core as it
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possibly can towards the back of the card They are claiming it runs up to 10°
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C cooler and up to around 16 DB quieter and while we were able to validate that
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it does run dramatically cooler than a reference card we don't have a deel
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meter unfortunately so we weren't able to validate that it runs quieter but it
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does run extremely quietly so I wouldn't be concerned about this card being low
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on the top you find two 8 Pin PCI Express connectors I would go ahead and
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say that that's probably totally unnecessary but that does in theory
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allow this card to draw more power therefore delivering more power to the
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GPU and other components and in theory overclock better in fact we did get a
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slightly better overclock out of the GTX 760 Hawk compared to our reference card
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which you'll see in the overclocking results and benchmarks at the end of
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this video on the back of the card we find a back plate I kind of I kind of
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you know was not that sold on back plates for a while but I think I've
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started liking them again they look quite nice and this is kind of a first
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for MSI it's the first time I've seen it but a matte black PCB the PCB on this
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card is absolutely gorgeous we've seen a lot of dark brown pcbs trying to pass
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for Black pcbs from MSI and that is not what they've done here there's a bio
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switch right here that goes from standard mode to liquid nitrogen mode
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depending on what kind of crazy bench marking you're doing on it and they've
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completely redesigned the entire PCB so
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it has a 6 Plus 2phase power design that is to say six phases for the GPU itself
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two phases for the RAM and nothing left of the original reference design it's
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got a PCI Express 3.0 16x connector down
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here it has two SLI fingers at the top supporting up to three-way SLI and then
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over on the io side you got two DVI ports HDMI and DisplayPort so that's
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full support for NVIDIA 3D Vision surround with one additional auxiliary
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display it uses military class four
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components so that means driver mosfet so that's a driver and a mosfet in one
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unit and then they've also got their copper mosfets for faster dis heat
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dissipation High SE caps and finally
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they're dark caps which are aluminum capacitors they're claiming up to a
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10year lifespan or something ridiculous like that software-wise it supports
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their triple over voltage feature so you know they have a few cards that they
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kind of slip under the envidia green light sort of you know blanket of not
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not too much overvolting and all that stuff so you can overv
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the GPU the RAM as well as the PLL so
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you can really fine-tune your overclock and that's all supported through MSI
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After Burner which around here at Linus Tech tips is our favorite NVIDIA GeForce
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graphics card overclocking utility remember you can use MSI After Burner on
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any graphics card as long as it doesn't have a weird vrm Solution that's not
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supported by it so not just on MSI cards although if you want to support the guys
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that build great utilities then you might want to buy an MSI card so that
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you know that all those good things can happen all right so performance we used
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our standard test bench with our six core processor 12 gigs or 16 16 gigs of
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RAM I think are running on it these days some SSD and uh anyway here are the
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Benchmark results so you can see here that our 760 Hawk Edition does slightly
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outperform our standard card all of this while in my personal opinion looking
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absolutely fantastic being extremely quiet and running extremely cool we only
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ran a few games because there's not really a whole lot to say about it it
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should be noted guys that we do overclock all of our cards so at stock
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this card will outperform the reference card by a little bit more but once you
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overclock both of them the Gap does tend to narrow a little bit if you aren't doing anything extreme on the cooling
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side or the overclocking tweaking and tuning side remember guys overclocking
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is always luck of the draw so there's no guarantee that your Hawk will overclock
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better than a standard card or that your standard card will overclock at all but
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it tends to be that the better designed cards with beef your vrm and more power
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and all that stuff do tend to overclock a little bit better one more thing I missed here at the back of the card
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those are those V checkpoints so you can actually check the exact voltages of
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various components with a multimeter rather than relying on software tools
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and I think that is pretty much it thank you for checking out my unboxing and
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review of the GTX 760 Hawk Edition from MSI don't forget to subscribe to lus
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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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it and leave a comment if there's anything you really feel very
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desperately that I should know