MSI's GeForce GTX 460 HAWK is rock solid version of a factory overclocked GTX 460 card. Thanks to MSI's clock speeds of 781 MHz GPU and 900 Memory memory, the card delivers about 10% more performance than a reference design GTX 460 with 1 GB of memory. If this is not enough for you, then you can engage in some manual overclocking to get the last out of the card. MSI has added a couple of extra features here. Instead of only GPU voltage control like on the reference designs, MSI lets you change GPU voltage, memory voltage and PLL voltage. While this sounds great on paper, the actual ranges you can adjust are fairly small and I could not see any gains from adjusting PLL voltage. However, every available option to change something can help and considering the reasonable price of the card it is a welcome addition.
We have seen the Twin Frozr II cooler on other MSI cards before and generally liked it - when the fan settings in the BIOS were optimized for it. This is the case on the MSI GTX 460 HAWK too. The card is quiet in both idle and load which makes it a worthy choice if you are looking for something that can power your media PC without much noise and still have enough power to play all current titles at HD resolutions with decent settings.
As mentioned before, the MSI N460GTX Hawk comes at a fair $249 which is in line with a 10% performance improvement over the reference design which costs $229. If you are after the best bang for the back, then the 768 MB version of the GTX 460 should be worth checking out.