MSI R6870 Hawk Pro Reviews

The MS R6870 Hawk’s price of around £150 is extremely reasonable for an upgrade that can cope with games in high detail and high resolutions and should satisfy anyone with a PC in need of a gaming boost. However, since it’s at the lower end of the range we tested, games in the future will push it to its limit, and it may not cope so well in a few years.

In our gameplay section the MSI R6870 Hawk was beaten by the GeForce GTX 560 Ti in its out-of-box configuration. However this video card is meant for overclocking and when it reaches its full potential it is able to slug it out with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Unfortunately a lot of the features that would make this video card great aren’t implemented as well as we would like them to be and it holds back the R6870 Hawk. We saw positive gameplay experience improvements from overclocking up to 1GHz, we just wish we would have the option to overclock higher than that. If so, we really think this video card could nail the GeForce GTX 560 Ti to the floor. The MSI R6870 Hawk can currently be had from $209.99 after mail-in-rebate. The bottom line is that for this price you cannot find better hardware out there.

All in all though, the MSI R6870 Hawk is not for those who want a fast card out of the box, for there are faster alternatives. That said, the MSI R6870 Hawk does redeem itself for being massively overclockable. Bearing in mind our clock speeds were achieved using no more than the Twin Frozr III cooler that came with the card, we are confident that enthusiasts with more aggressive cooling setups will achieve even better results with the R6870 Hawk.

Overall, the MSI R6870 Hawk has made significant changes to the original R6870, which followed the Radeon HD 6870 reference design very closely. Things like the 8+2 phase PWM and the new Twin Frozr III design with propeller blade technology undoubtedly make this card cost more to produce. That being said, the MSI R6870 Hawk rings in for $234.99 at Newegg.com right now. That's just $10 more than the non-overclocked R6870 with Twin Frozr II technology. In fact, if you are into mail-in-rebates, as of 3 March 2011, both cards cost exactly same, sans shipping.

I'd say that even at $10 more, the MSI R6870 Hawk is a great deal and an excellent value. The factory overclock is one thing, but the massive cooling ability and redesigned PCB make the R6870 Hawk an excellent candidate for overclocking even further. That's all on top of the fact that it can easily play the games we used in our test bed, albeit maybe not at the highest settings.