MSI R7870 Hawk Pro Reviews

When looking at a card, we try to look at it as a package, rather than at individual attributes. The R7870 HAWK is presently on the market for around 319.99 which is about even with the other players in the category. The efficiency of the Twin Frozr IV cooler means the card’s heat is not an issue unless it really gets pushed hard. However the cooler’s dual fans can get loud when they spin up to full RPM. The card’s performance is also very good, meeting the GTX 580 almost head to head in many cases, and even eclipsing it depending on the benchmark. The overclocking headroom is immense, with memory getting a very fruitful increase in clockspeed right out of the gate, and the GPU showing it can really move as well. Add to this the fact that there is a completely separate BIOS that is unlocked and setup for extreme cooling/benchmarking, and this card could easily hit far better numbers for those who love to push benchmarks.

The first R5770 Hawk that I reviewed just simply blew me away. It was a great combination of value, performance, and design extras that made it a fantastic card. The R7870 Hawk is the direct descendent of that card, and the pedigree shows. It is all the things that the original was, but a whole lot more. Bigger, faster, louder, and more expensive. I’m not entirely sure these are all positives, but I also think that a user does get quite a bit for the money spent.

The MSI R7870 Hawk performs very well. In almost every single benchmark, it outperformed the GTX 580. Nearly everything we threw at it came back with playable FPS rates. Almost any game that is available now will be playable at high performance settings on the MSI R7870 Hawk. Even if you weren't planning on overclocking the R7870 Hawk, it would still perform extremely well under almost any circumstance. The R7870 Hawk looks pretty good. It follows a long line of Twin Frozr equipped MSI video cards and looks just like you would expect. I like the blue highlights on the black plastic shroud. The only real difference between the R7870 Hawk and other Twin Frozr equipped cards is the addition of the GPU reactor on the back. Along with the GPU reactor comes a black plate that covers the back of the card. I like the sleek look of that, although the bulge of the reactor seems a little out of place on the card. The GPU reactor, however, lights up a nice blue. That color adds a lot to the appearance of the MSI R7870 Hawk, especially if you have a windowed case.

Not only is the MSI HD 7870 HAWK an awesome AMD Radeon HD 7870 part, but it's an absolutely awesome video card period. Like other video cards that are part of the HAWK, Lightning and Power Edition series, they not only perform great, but they're just awesome fun to use because of the wicked overclocking ability due to all of those high quality parts and workmanship added by MSI. Something we noticed when it came to benchmarking was that when benching at 2560 x 1600, the HD 7870 HAWK either had no issue out performing the reference clocked HD 7970 or sat behind it by a little. The main reason for this would be that while the clocks we reached are indeed massive, we're being a little limited by that 256-bit memory bus verse the 384-bit bus that's present on the more expensive Radeon HD 7970.

AMD did a good job with their Radeon HD 7870. MSI's HD 7870 HAWK builds on that foundation and tries to create an overclocker's SKU that provides maximum performance and overclocking potential. Thanks to the 100 MHz overclock out of the box, the HD 7870 HAWK has a 5% performance advantage over the AMD reference design. This is a decent increase, yet I would have expected more from a card like this, as there is plenty of clock headroom available. MSI's Lightning gains 8% over the respective reference design. Our manual overclocking tests confirmed that the HD 7870 HAWK overclocks very well. A maximum clock of 1260 MHz is the highest GPU clock we have ever seen in a TPU review, and is only matched by the ASUS HD 7870 Direct CU II. MSI has also included the dual BIOS feature, which is used to enable a special liquid nitrogen optimized BIOS. We also see the voltage measurement points on the card that we like so much. On the back of the card an extra PCB "GPU Reactor" has been added. It provides additional filtering for the GPU voltage, but I wonder why this couldn't have been more integrated into the PCB, so it doesn't take up extra space, which might make multi-GPU configurations difficult in small cases. Power consumption during typical gaming is slightly increased, due to the higher clocks. Furmark shows a large increase of 100 W over the reference design though. I have to admit, Furmark is not a realistic test for every day usage, but it can still provide an additional data point, for worst-case scenarios for example. Such a large increase in power consumption is very uncommon.