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.