Introduction

In October last year, AMD released its second-generation Radeon HD 6800 DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The time spent between HD 5000 and HD 6000 was used to refine and fine-tune its architecture to better suit the existing 40 nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per mm² of die-area (plays an important role in product pricing), compared to the previous-generation Evergreen architecture.

MSI's Radeon HD 6870 HAWK comes with many features geared toward overclockers, like voltage control support for three voltages, voltage measurement points, dual BIOS and a powerful cooler. The card is also overclocked out of the box and MSI asks a $30 price premium for all those features.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• DVI Adapter
• Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort Adapter
• 2x PCI-Express Power Cable
• 3x Voltage measurement cable

The Card

MSI is using a new revision of their cooler for the HD 6870 HAWK, I really like the red and black highlight in the bottom right.


The card requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, two mini-DisplayPorts and one HDMI port. AMD's display output logic is clearly superior to what NVIDIA has to offer at this time. Vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time. AMD has also introduced DisplayPort 1.2 support with their new cards which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.

An HDMI sound device is also included in the GPU. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. The new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.


You may combine up to two HD 6800 cards of any model from any vendor in CrossFire.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.