MSI N460GTX Hawk Pro Reviews

The MSI GeForce GTX 460 HAWK is one of the best GF104 cards we have seen and thanks to a complement of overclocking hardware and software features, a high quality board design, custom cooler and overclocked frequencies this is one graphics card that should get any budget PC gamers' attention.

The MSI N460GTX Hawk Edition card is one of those outstanding cards that overclocks very well, with clock speeds nearing 1GHz. Considering that the standard GeForce GTX460 has a clock speed of 675MHz, the HAWK nearly overclocks by 50% which is simply amazing. Performance on the card is outstanding for this price point. The card will retail for $249.99, making it one of the better bargains on the market today.

Given the great out-of-box performance, custom features, fantastic software and near 1GHz potential, the MSI N460GTX Hawk Edition earns a Silver [H] award.

Couple in the new lower pricing structure that NVIDIA just released and you can pick this card up for a cool $199 after rebates. Excellent performance, excellent cooling and the ability to overclock makes the MSI N460GTX HAWK a purpose-built card for the enthusiast on a budget!

If you have a monitor with Full-HD or lower resolution, the battle between the Radeon 5850 and the MSI GeForce N460GTX Hawk is close, with current pricing of the two only making it more so. The decisive factor will simply be the prevailing price at the time of purchase - buy the one that is priced lower.

Let's face it, almost any GTX460 card is going to get high marks at this stage of the game. NVIDIA has priced it very aggressively, and until ATI responds with some serious price cuts, or releases its next generation of video cards, this is the card to beat in the $200-$250 price range. It's pretty obvious from all the reporting that's been done already, that early production units of the GF104 have tons of overclocking headroom. I got 950 MHz on the core clock with very little effort, and the Twin Frozr cooler kept the temperatures well below 60C no matter how hard I stressed the card. If you really want to push your graphics card to the max and beyond, without worrying about cooking the GPU, this is the GTX 460 card to buy.

MSI's GeForce GTX 460 HAWK is rock solid version of a factory overclocked GTX 460 card. Thanks to MSI's clock speeds of 781 MHz GPU and 900 Memory memory, the card delivers about 10% more performance than a reference design GTX 460 with 1 GB of memory. If this is not enough for you, then you can engage in some manual overclocking to get the last out of the card. MSI has added a couple of extra features here. Instead of only GPU voltage control like on the reference designs, MSI lets you change GPU voltage, memory voltage and PLL voltage. While this sounds great on paper, the actual ranges you can adjust are fairly small and I could not see any gains from adjusting PLL voltage. However, every available option to change something can help and considering the reasonable price of the card it is a welcome addition.

The HAWK version of the GTX 460 doesn't carry with it the same weight as the HD 5770 version did when we looked at it. The main reason for this is that since launch we've seen companies offer us big OC models out of the box straight away. The leg up that MSI have on the competition isn't quite as strong as back then.