MSI's HD 6870 HAWK comes with a full range of features for overclockers. The most important are software voltage control for three voltages via MSI Afterburner, voltage measurement outputs, OCP disable switch and the dual BIOS which can help to recover the card from a bad BIOS flash. In the second BIOS, MSI has placed a low-noise optimized version of the normal performance BIOS which does a decent job reducing noise levels. Nevertheless, in my opinion there is still more headroom left to quieten down the card some more. Right now the low noise BIOS is a versatile BIOS for day to day use including overclocking and voltage increases. It would have been nice to see a BIOS that really focuses on low noise instead of being a jack of all trades, but not excelling at anything.
In terms of performance, the MSI HD 6870 HAWK delivers about what we expected. Thanks to the higher clocks out of the box it has a 3% performance advantage over reference design HD 6870's which is decent but not spectacular. Overclocking potential was alright, maybe a bit on the low side of what we have seen from other HD 6870 cards. We could break the 1 GHz mark using voltage increases though, but voltage maxxes out at 1.35 V. Based on our data, it looks like the card would gain some more with even higher voltage.
Overall the MSI Radeon HD 6870 HAWK is a solid HD 6870 card that brings many overclocker features, resulting in a $30 price increase which feels a little bit on the high side, even though I wouldn't call it unreasonable.