As impressive as reference cards can be when they are introduced, it’s always impressive to see what all of the manufactures do with them when they have a little time to toy with the overclocks and fit their aftermarket cooling designs. A good example would be the card I’m going to take a look at today. The MSI GTX 760 Hawk looks similar to the GTX 780 Gaming that I recently took a look at, but with a yellow theme that would go perfectly with their new Z87 M Power motherboard. I wonder how it will perform compared to the reference GTX 760 as well as the aftermarket cards. They set the mark high, so MSI is going to have their work cut out for them.

Product Name: MSI GTX 760 Hawk

Review Sample Provided by: MSI

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Packaging

Although the GTX 760 Hawk uses the same overall layout that we have seen on other MSI video cards, there is a clear difference with the cover having a full picture of a F17 fighter plane all the way across it. You can see the OC certified logo in the top right corner as well as the GTX 760 branding on the bottom right corner. Under the Hawk name you can see how much memory you are getting as well as PCI Express 3.0 and DirectX 11. All of the important information is there while still keeping it all clean. I can’t help but think in a retail setting that a photo of the great looking card itself would really get people’s attention though. The front of the box does open up to have more details information on the cards cooler, overclocking features, and military class 4 components.

Because of the information inside the front cover, the back gets right to the point with a feature list, minimum specifications, and a full specifications listing. It’s great to see that they can put the specifications on the box rather than keeping things ambiguous like other manufactures do to be able to use the packaging on multiple models.

Inside the packaging you will find a box sitting on top with all of your accessories and then under it the GTX 760 Hawk is wrapped up in a static protective bag and places in foam to keep it from moving around. Inside the accessories box you will find a quick start guide and a driver disk, a DVI to VGA adapter, three voltage reading headers, and two six to 8 pin adapters. I like the red and black theme that they went with, this is much better than the mixed colors that you would normally see on adapters like this.

Card Layout and Photos

At first glance one might think that the GTX 760 Hawk is just a yellow themed GTX 760 TwinFrozr from the outside appearance. It isn’t really until you look a little close that you see Hawk branding on the card at all actually. You will find the stealth F17 and the Hawk logo on the centers of the two fans. If you look even closer though you will catch that the PCB itself says Hawk on it, obviously MSI has done a little bit more to this card than just toss on a little yellow. They went with a custom PCB design that is considerably longer than the reference design in order for them to be able to slip in two additional PWM phases. The longer PCB also helps the GTX 760 Hawk support the length of the TwinFrozr IV cooler. Speaking of the TwinFrozr cooling, MSI is using their Propeller Blade Technology that provided 20% more airflow than a traditional fan design of the same size. They also sport their dust removal technology that spins the fans in reverse on bootup to kick off any dust or in my case cat hair that may have collected.

Because it is one of the only parts of the card that you will actually see when it is installed in your case, the top edge of the GTX 760 Hawk does have a MSI logo on the fan shroud. It would be nice if there was also a GTX 760 Hawk badge though to really show off the card.

The TwinFrozr cooling on the GTX 760 Hawk is sporting a total of five heatpipes to pull the heat from the GPU and out onto the cards heatsink. Four of the five heatpipes are on the bottom while the last heatpipe on the top that goes out to the cards farthest point is much thicker than the others. The nickel-plated finish on each heatpipe really gives the card a great look when you can see them, especially from the bottom. It’s a shame that hardly anyone will see them once the card is installed in a PC. MSI used a bracket from the PCI slot cover all the way to the backplate to give the card even more strength, this same design was used on the GTX 780 Gaming as well.

One of the cards key overclocking features are the three voltage check points on the end of the card. As you may have seen in the packaging section MSI included small adapters that plug into these headers to make it easier to plug your multi-meter prongs into while adjusting your overclock. You can also see here that the fan shroud design is open on the end of the card meaning some of the heat generated by the card will vent into your case. This isn’t a big deal in most cases but if your case struggles with heat already you may want to keep it in mind.  

Although MSI calls the backplate a second heatsink, in my book it is a typical backplate like we have seen on a few cards in the past. I really wish we saw backplates on more cards because not only do they strengthen the card but they also protect the PCB from damage when you are handling it and even in your computer. The only downside is a backplate like this also cuts into the space between two cards if for some reason you are forced to run two cards up against each other rather than spacing them out at all. Another feature here on the back of the card is the dual BIOS switch that MSI included for overclockers to be able to switch between a normal over from a normal BIOS to their LN2 BIOS for example.

The MSI GTX 760 Hawk has the same two SLI bridge connections that the other GTX 760’s also have. That means you can run them in triple SLI if you decide that two in SLI isn’t enough for your needs.

All you have to do is look at the two 8-pin power connections to know that MSI means business with the Hawk. The reference card has two 6-pin connections and the two other overclocked cards that I have covered sport an 8-pin/6-pin combination.

The MSI GTX 760 Hawk has all of the same connections that we saw on other GTX 760’s. You get a full sized DisplayPort, a full sized HDMI, and two DVI connections. There is a good amount of ventilation on the PCI cover as well including a small bit in between the HDMI and DVI ports.

Our Test Rig and Procedures

Software

A few of the manufactures have gone above and beyond over the past few years to provide software to help your experience with your new card. MSI is one of those manufactures. Much like Asus, their software is designed to work with both their AMD and Nvidia offerings. This makes life easier for someone like me who is constantly swapping out cards and it also helps to only have one file to pick from over one for each.

MSI’s software is called Afterburner and I have been using it off and on since its introduction. The base functionality hasn’t changed much. Just like the other companies offerings you can adjust your power and temperature limits, toy with your memory and core clocks, and even adjust the fan speed. Where MSI has managed to stand out in my opinion is with the built in screen shot and video recording functions. As someone who uses fraps a lot for this same reason, it’s nice to have a free option that does the same thing. It’s especially cool because I would already want to run afterburner anyhow to keep an eye on my video card.

Another option that MSI offers is a voltage slider. EVGA for example hides there’s and hardly gives you any adjustability. If you change your config file in afterburner you can go nuts with toying with your voltage (up to +12 that is). Of course you want to keep in mind that you can damage your card by doing this.

Cooling, Noise, and Power

Although there might be more to the GTX 760 Hawk than just what you can see on the outside, I can’t help and think back to the amazing performance we have previously seen from the other TwinFrozr cards in the past, because of that I was excited to see how it performed compared to the other GTX 760’s that I have tested in the past. To start things off I went with the temperature testing while running Heaven Benchmark 4.0. The GTX 760 Hawk came in within a degree of the EVGA offering while the Gigabyte triple fan design did out-perform it. The reference card on the other hand was 12 degrees hotter meaning the TwinFrozr cooling did its job outperformed the stock design. Of course with a considerably higher overclock over the other 760’s the Hawk’s performance is even more impressive.

As you will see right away the MSI GTX 760 Hawk is down near the bottom in both of our tests. I especially like the 100% load noise levels the Hawk is actually within 4 decibels of the idle noise levels on a few other cards and a well below what the Gigabyte Windforce GTX 760 did.

With a unique PCB design and two additional PWM I was curious if it would make a big difference in power usage. I found the idle results to be spot on with the other GTX 760’s but under load the MSI GTX 760 Hawk did pull another 8 watts over what we saw with the Gigabyte card and 25 watts over the reference design! That puts it up within 11 watts of the GTX 770 cards even. I hope the overclocking and performance is worth the additional draw.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Before we get into the results from my synthetic benchmarks I also wanted to point out the various base clocks from the other GTX 760’s that I have tested.

As you can see, ALL of the overclocked 760’s I have tested have a noticeable increase over stock and the GTX 760 Hawk stands high above them. Because of that I do have fairly high hopes for its performance.

The performance numbers did live up to my expectations. In 3DMark Fire Strike for example the Hawk pulled a 6685 compared to 6300’s for the overclocked cards and a 6147 from the reference card. I would say that is a major jump in performance. Similar results were found in 3DMark 11 and Heaven benchmark as well.

In Game Benchmarks

The MSI GTX 760 Hawk performed well in the synthetic benchmarks but we all know in game performance is what it’s all about right? Most of us build our PC’s specifically too game, so if it doesn’t do well there none of the other stuff matters. The MSI GTX 760 Hawk showed a similar bump in performance as in the synthetic benchmarks, this translated to at least 2-3 FPS in most games. This was enough to bring the numbers up fairly close to the results from the GTX 680 in some cases as well as the GTX 770. That wasn’t in every game, games like Tomb Raider where the FPS was lower overall, I saw a much bigger gap between the GTX 770/680 and the GTX 760 Hawk. It’s still interesting to see what big overclock will do though. All in all you are going to see playable frame rates in every game that you can toss at it with the settings turned up. If you are looking for 60FPS there will be a few games that you may need to turn off or turn down AA slightly.

Overclocking

Much like all of the other GTX 760’s I put the MSI GTX 760 Hawk through our normal overclock testing. That means I tweaked to see how high I could get the GPU and Memory clocks while running the card through test two on 3DMark 11 for a short load test. All of my testing is with the power limit set as high as possible as well as the fan on 100% to make sure temperatures aren’t holding things back. I started with GPU Clock Speed overclocking and almost immediately hit my limit when I attempted a 200MHz offset as well as 150MHz offset. After some playing I found that 140MHz offset was the highest I could go without any crashes. This took my FPS up from 42.70 to 46.57.

On to memory clock overclocking I started extremely aggressive with a 300MHz offset and without any issues continued to push things up over and over. When I hit 600 I started jumping up in 50MHz increments because I was a little more worried that I was going to damage the card. Even so I was able to keep pushing the Hawk all the way up to an 850MHz offset before I had issues at 900MHz. That put my highest test result all the way at 3856MHz aka 7712MHz, a VERY impressive number. This is much higher than the 3602MHz I was able to eek out of the reference GTX 760.

Overall and Final Verdict

For the first time in a very long time, when I was putting together my Pro’s and Con’s for the MSI GTX 760 Hawk I actually ran out of room in the Pro’s section. If you have read any of the previous sections you will find that the Hawk out performs all of the other GTX 760 options in cooling, synthetic benchmarks, in game benchmarks, and even overclocking.

There are only two areas where the Hawk didn’t top the charts for its class; first its power draw was considerably higher than any other GTX 760 that I have tested. The second area we have yet to talk about is price. I’m told that the Hawk will come in at 289.99 or 299.99. Even the lesser amount is about $40 more than the other GTX 760’s. But you are getting a lot more card for the additional money. Along with the additional performance, you are getting a backplate, two more PWM’s, and one of the best coolers on the market.

Considering the price gap between the GTX 760 and the GTX 770, I think MSI has a great card here. Additionally, for those looking at this card for overclocking, I can say without a doubt that even though my numbers are great. There is still more performance to be had once you get into toying with the voltages as well. 

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.