MSI Radeon HD 6870 HAWK 1 GB
Packaging & Contents »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.
| Radeon HD 5770 | GeForce GTX 460 | GeForce GTX 460 | Radeon HD 6850 | Radeon HD 5850 | GeForce GTX 470 | Radeon HD 6870 | MSI HD 6870 HAWK | Radeon HD 5870 | Radeon HD 6950 | GeForce GTX 570 | |
| Shader units | 800 | 336 | 336 | 960 | 1440 | 448 | 1120 | 1120 | 1600 | 1408 | 480 |
| ROPs | 16 | 24 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 40 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 40 |
| GPU | Juniper | GF104 | GF104 | Barts | Cypress | GF100 | Barts | Barts | Cypress | Cayman | GF110 |
| Transistors | 1040M | 1950M | 1950M | 1700M | 2154M | 3200M | 1700M | 1700M | 2154M | 2640M | 3000M |
| Memory Size | 1024 MB | 768 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 1280 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 2048 MB | 1280 MB |
| Memory Bus Width | 128 bit | 192 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 320 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 320 bit |
| Core Clock | 850 MHz | 675 MHz | 675 MHz | 775 MHz | 725 MHz | 607 MHz | 900 MHz | 930 MHz | 850 MHz | 800 MHz | 732 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1200 MHz | 900 MHz | 900 MHz | 1000 MHz | 1000 MHz | 837 MHz | 1050 MHz | 1050 MHz | 1200 MHz | 1250 MHz | 950 MHz |
| Price | $120 | $150 | $180 | $180 | $200 | $250 | $220 | $250 | $270 | $290 | $350 |