MSI N760 HAWK Pro Reviews

MSI has long touted the Military Class components on their cards due to the fact that they are specially tested components, not just by them but by a third party testing center according to the enclosed certificate. “Military Class components” sounds nice, but are they really necessary on a card or motherboard? Honestly, no as most times the reference components are good enough to do their job. However, they are not designed to push the limits to the extreme. The answer is better and stronger components. Most manufacturers worth their salt will use better components, so in order to try and stand out, MSI uses “Military Class” components in an attempt to ensure better hardware reliability.

MSI has engineered a fantastic GeForce GTX 760 with their GTX 760 HAWK. The card comes overclocked out of the box with the highest frequency we've seen on a GTX 760. This translates into a performance improvement of almost 10% over the reference design—something you'll definitely notice in-game. With those clocks, it even ends up faster than the AMD HD 7970 and only 7% behind AMD's flagship HD 7970 GHz Edition. I only wish MSI had also overclocked the memory since our manual overclocking tests show that there is plenty of headroom to do so. Compared to the MSI GTX 760 GAMING, the company beefed up their cooler for the HAWK, which provides additional cooling potential to make sure the card handles the increased clocks while still leaving enough headroom for manual overclocking. Temperatures are great, and noise levels are good too. The only GTX 760 that is quieter is MSI's GTX 760 GAMING, making it a good alternative if you value low noise more than the absolutely highest performance. It's also great to see a backplate on the GTX 760 HAWK, something many cheaper cards lack.

The MSI N760 HAWK was built for overclocking and is currently the fastest GeForce GTX 760 video card that we have ever tested!