A great little card from our pals at Gainward that juuuuust brushes against the performance ceiling.
When we first looked at the GTX460 in Issue 116, we immediately knew that NVIDIA was on a winner. The GF104 core, based on a heavily revised Fermi architecture, is like cracking open a cool can of drink on a sweltering day – and it’s certainly refreshing to see this design finally make the impact that was always promised. Not only does the GF104 live up to the original promises of Fermi, fulfilling both performance and price, but it also offers a flexibility in design that we haven’t seen on a mass scale for years; with no restrictions on hardware design, manufacturers are given effectively free reign to unleash whatever features they deem appropriate.
MSI took those reigns and handed them over to the engineering department who, once given an unrestrained chance at designing a card, let fly with all their graphical know-how. This is immediately noticeable in the factory overclock seen in the HAWK, which has been boosted from the reference NVIDIA core clockspeed of 675MHz to a whopping 780MHz, a guaranteed baseline increase of 105MHz. Though the 1GB of GDDR5 memory remains unchanged at a speed of 900MHz, which is quad-pumped as an effect of the type of memory for an effective 3600MHz, it is connected to the GF104 core via a decently-thick 256-bit memory bus.
The hierarchy of MSI cards places the HAWK model at the top, with the Cyclone in the middle, and a reference design as the entry-level. This means that the HAWK has all of MSI’s features packed in, such as the custom eight-phase power delivery for the core, premium super-ferrite chokes (that are more precise than standard chokes), and voltage measurement points for the memory, core and PLL.
It also means that the HAWK is endowed with MSI’s top-end heatsink design, the eternally awkwardly-named Twin Frozr II. This has proven to be a great dissipater of heat, which is drawn from the core by a large nickel-plated copper block, then removed from the block by four thick heatpipes, and taken from the heatpipes by a large amount of aluminium fins. Inset in these fins are two 8cm software-controllable fans, which work in tandem to keep temperatures under control. However, as an annoying side-effect of their slim design, they must work harder than a case fan to generate sufficient pressure to force air between the tightly-spaced heatsink fins, directly generating extra noise in the process.
Temperatures are fantastic, beginning as low as 30 degrees Celsius and rising only twenty degrees to 50 under Crysis load. This was at the expense of peace and quiet, with the cooler humming at 59.1dBA at idle and a roaring 70.7dBA at load. Thankfully the included overclocking software, Afterburner, can control fanspeed based on temperature, and we’d be happier running it a little hotter to save our ears.
Performance was also nothing short of spectacular, and compared to even the GTX470 the HAWK is very appealing. It lags behind in Crysis performance by a mere three average frames a second, 185 points in 3DMark Vantage and 1.9 frames in tessellated Heaven. Thanks to its high clockspeed the HAWK also managed 26.3fps in our new Lost Planet 2 DX11 benchmark.
Even better than its stock speed is its price; rocking in at less than $350, it’s slightly cheaper than budget GTX470 cards without demanding the higher model’s huge power draw. A stock GTX460 is great, but if you’re looking to move up higher without overclocking yourself the HAWK is a great choice that guarantees speeds almost as high as the next step up, without the added cost or drawbacks.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012