MSI GTX 460 HAWK 1 GB Review 38

MSI GTX 460 HAWK 1 GB Review

A Closer Look »

The Card

Graphics Card Front
Graphics Card Back

Most of you already know MSI's Twin Frozr II cooler from a variety of their other cards. It has become a very well working, unique solution that is adaptable to both ATI and NVIDIA which helps with the production costs due to bigger production runs.

Graphics Card Height

The MSI GTX 460 HAWK uses two slots, just like the NVIDIA reference design.

Monitor Outputs, Display Connectors

The card has two DVI ports, and one Mini-HDMI port (Mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter is included). Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards 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. On NVIDIA cards you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-Ray 3D titles shipping.


You may combine up to two GTX 460 cards in SLI for added performance or improved image quality settings.

Graphics Card Teardown PCB Front
Graphics Card Teardown PCB Back

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.
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Nov 22nd, 2024 02:20 EST change timezone

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