MSI R7870 Hawk:
The first time we had this model in our hands was in May 2012 and it was sold at that time for 349 euros. The “Hawk” series was very interesting because although it was below the “Lightning” series, we were entitled to an in-house PCB and integrated tools for overclocking such as three voltage measurement plugs for the GPU, the memory and the PLL.
In 2012, we had already been able to do a series of tests with the original cooling system and the gains were very interesting. MSI had also made available for this model and for overclockers, a LN2 BIOS that strongly debrided the card’s limits. So we flashed this R7870 Hawk but never ran it under cold conditions. Our first series of tests with the original cooling system allowed us to increase the GPU frequency from 1100 to 1300 MHz and the memory from 1200 to 1600 MHz. The current version of Afterburner allows us to have access to the voltages but I have in mind that the version 2.2.3 allowed to have a larger range. We are trying to find this version.
Now that we know that our card is perfectly operational, we head to Hwbot to note the best scores obtained with this card in the various benchmarks. The idea is of course to take the first place by starting with the 3DMark series.
