Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of a card that's actually very exciting this is the MSI Radeon 7870 Hawk now if you know anything about msi hawk edition cards you know basically that they are badass because they build they just completely over build these cards and they are actually not that much more expensive than a regular one now when you factor in all so that the 7870 is already a terrific value in a great overclocker and Hawk Edition cards are all about overclocking and not costing that much more yes I am very excited about this card so comes with a three-year warranty and USA in Canada and Mexico incidentally if you live in Vancouver there's a local RMA Depot which is really handy because you just go in and you can basically like walk in instead of shipping comes with GPU reactor ready for 3d mark 11 which basically just means it's DirectX 11 card military class three concept once again I'm talking about over building that's what I mean MSI Afterburner up to 85% over okay well come on MSI Afterburner softwares obviously included in supported unlocked digital power so this again comes into the over building of card aspect of things here we go there's a stealth fighter or bomber or something breaking World Records with unlock digital power digital okay so unlock BIOS digital PWM controller and has power design for best overclocking stability as top solution on HD 7870 graphic card I believe it based on past hawk card experience one click to unlock all the protections including over current protection disable active phase switching higher catalyst control center range and a higher power turn range that's awesome remember guys power tune keeps your your board within a certain power threshold all reference boards have it from both vendors these days for the latest generation products these these power throttles that are built into the cards turn it off fantastic great for overclockers digital pwm controller so more stable and precise voltage by a digital signal okay it has power design you clipped with eight phases for the GPU and two phases for memory and one phase for VDC military class three components including copper MOSFETs highly conductive capacitors gold and solid state chokes I don't know that the gold coating actually increases performance but it looks cool dark solid capacitors but the special coating for anti rust protection interesting so I guess if you're in a fairly humid environment that would be a definite factor okay three by three OC kits must-have features for extreme overclockers VIII checkpoints agreed 100% you can use a multimeter to read the actual values triple over voltage must again a total must triple ten monitors able to monitor the GPU memory and vrm awesome okay what else we got in here Dooley at centimeter pwm fence superpipe technology with eight millimeter heat pipes dual form and one heat sinks nickel plated copper base propeller blade technology which in theory gives you better air flow as well as making dust less likely to accumulate in the heatsink so the fan spin and reverse on startup which removes the dust before it actually starts cooling which is very very cool and I've learned to trust emphasize claims with respect to thermal performance so they're staying up to fifteen degrees cooler than a reference and up to five decibels quieter than a reference once you start overclocking their twin pros our coolers just destroy the reference coolers on both the AMD and the Nvidia side so in terms of included accessories we've got a DVI to VGA adapter to dual molex to 6-pin PCI connectors as well as a mini DP 2 full-size DisplayPort adapter we've also got our V check point pieces so these plug into the V tach points on the card and these plug into your multi limit monitor leads we have ok something oh no way find the GPU reactor card and have the obverse side of the card turn upward as illustrated to check the correct installation orientation note we're going to find out more about this GPU reactor so GPU reactor basically increases the voltage stability and reduces ripple to the GPU for an extreme overclocking it is not required for air or even water operation but if you want to throw liquid nitrogen or dry I accept the problem it's probably recommended to use it we've got a driver disc throw away that download latest off the AMD website quick user guidance certificate of quality and stability now I've always kind of laughed at these certificates that get included with cars before because I actually didn't know what steps get thrown into something like military class three I actually happened to have a slide deck over here that includes all of the different tests so there's temperature shock test which is done in a chamber there's the rainy day indoor humidity test vibration test low pressure test high temperature test low temperature test for liquid nitrogen cooling dam and shock test that is where the certificate of quality and stability comes from now that's not to say that they take the card and like drop it and that's like that's like you know falling down test no it's more to do with the components that went into the cart than the actual finished end-user product itself and of course being a hawk addition card it looks ballin out so we've got dual eighty millimeter pwm fans once again this is with their dust reduction it's been the other way for a little bit and then spin this way technology the shroud is made of aluminum looks very very nice we've got a beast looking aluminum cooler so you can see it stretches all the way from here all the way past the back of the end of the PCB so that is an enormous amount of cooling surface area you can see the super pipes here so these are more like normal heat pipes one two three the super pipes are at the ends and the reason for that is you can see the GPU right there all the heat pipes are positioned directly over the GPU itself and these ones are bigger because they have to carry heat more efficiently because they're going further away that is what's going to make all of the area that the fans cover cool the card as effectively as possible so these super pipes go into the thickest area of the heatsink that is further away that is right next to the fan so it's getting a very significant amount of airflow now the fans don't only cool the GPU itself but because there's no barrier between the fins themselves and the cart you can see clearly that the there is a heat spreader covering the card and then all of that incidental airflow is going to cool the PWM components the RAM you can see the thermal material that is between the memory and the heat spreader itself you can also see the gold-plated oh wow those look so cool can you see that that is awesome it's like can you give me a nod or a nay success yes splick says those are amazing okay just all that let's see I'm like I'm like not letting you guys look at it cuz like I'm trying to see them better sorry moving on so cool okay moving on to the back of the board here is the GPU reactor thingamabob right here so it can actually be removed warning be noted that any improper installation of GPU reactor card may cause damage to the card so okay give me a sec here guys I'm gonna try to forget how to do this sorry I just had to press a little bit harder so what's cool is you can actually turn it either way so if you happen to have like an upside down ATX case you could like turn it the other way so that it's still right-side up in the side oh there's LEDs in here too so it's gonna light up so this is the GPU reactor board which as I mentioned increases the stability see they can only cram so many components on the back of the GPU itself to have you know to control the voltage that goes to the various parts of the chip msi said no not enough we need more so they built this guy right here which plugs in so you can I hope you guys can see that plugs into those two slots you may want to make sure you don't put it on wrong because I'm sure that would deliver all the wrong voltages everywhere and then you cover it up with this thing obviously this thing isn't necessarily crossfire ready because it makes the back of the card on top of the backplate itself it bulges out a little bit more so if you were a slot to slot then it wouldn't really work that well but as long as you're running a single card or duel cards with lots of spacing that is just awesome speaking of which there's a backplate on the card itself so the aesthetics of it are very very sleek looking so you can see even the the heat spreader here over the front of the card the Unison comes like this and just has like a very nice look to it and the side logo on the top this uses still uses dual 6 pin PCI connectors remember this is a 28 nanometer GPU so it's not like it's even in an extreme overclocking scenario you're not going to run into the need for more than dual six pins and I'm personally not a huge believer that an 8 pin can deliver that much more power than a 6 pin in a real-world scenario on account of it's just two more ground pins correct me if I'm wrong PCI Express 3.0 is of course included this is a new generation card a 7000 series card so that is a given although once again I'm not 100% sure that the bandwidth increases necessarily that significant in a real-world scenario there's our v checkpoints so you use those little dongles right there you plug those all in and then you can connect to whichever ones you want to measure your true voltages in real time so they're labeled memory PLL and GPU memory PLL and GPU ok let's have a look at the back of the cards so it supports up to 4 displays right out of the box 2 through DVI HDMI and 2 through mini DisplayPort now if you can daisy chain them I believe you can support up to do something like 6 displays by doing two monitors per display port but most monitors don't have support for that functionality just yet anyway support for prosperity' to 2-way configurations because there is only one crossfire connector and I think that pretty much covers it so it comes clocked at one point one gigahertz so even though it says gigahertz Edition on the box or something like that what they really mean is gigahertz and more Edition this is a hot card it is pre overclocked and comes with ample Headroom for additional overclocking thank you for checking out my unboxing at the 7870 Hawk Edition and don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos