 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 overbuild these cards and they're actually not that much more expensive than a regular one. Now when you factor in also that the 7870 is already a terrific value and 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 it comes with a three year warranty in USA and 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 3DMark 11 which basically just means it's DirectX 11 card, military class 3 concept. Once again I'm talking about overbuilding, that's what I mean. MSI Afterburner up to 85% overclocking, okay well come on. MSI Afterburner software is obviously included and supported. Unlocked digital power, so this again comes into the overbuilding the card aspect of things. Here we go. There's a stealth fighter or bomber or something. Breaking world records with unlocked digital power. Okay so unlocked BIOS, digital PWM controller has power design for best overclocking stability as top solution on HT7870 graphics cards. I believe it based on past Hawk card experience. One click to unlock all the protections including overcurrent protection, disable active phase switching, higher catalyst control center range and a higher power tune range. That's awesome. Remember guys, power tune keeps your board within a certain power threshold. All reference boards have it from both vendors these days for the latest generation products. These power throttles that are built into the cards. Just turn it off. Fantastic, great for overclockers. Digital PWM controller, so more stable and precise voltage by digital signal, okay. Enhanced power design equipped with eight phases for the GPU and two phases for memory and one phase for VDDC. Military class three components including copper MOSFETs, highly conductive capacitors, golden solid state chokes. I don't know that the gold coating actually increases performance but it looks cool. Dark solid capacitors with a 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, V checkpoints agreed 100%. You can use a multimeter to read the actual values. Triple over voltage, again, a total must. Triple temp monitors able to monitor the GPU memory and VRM. Awesome. Okay, what else we got in here? Dual eight centimeter PWM fan, super pipe technology with eight millimeter heat pipes, dual form in one heat sinks, nickel plated copper base, propeller blade technology which in theory gives you better airflow as well as making dust less likely to accumulate in the heat sink. So the fan spin in reverse on startup which removes the dust before it actually starts cooling which is very, very cool. And I've learned to trust MSI's claims with respect to thermal performance so they're saying up to 15 degrees cooler than a reference and up to five decibels quieter than a reference. Actually that's probably conservative especially when you're overclocking. Once you start overclocking their TwinFrozer coolers just destroy the reference coolers on both the AMD and the Nvidia side. So in terms of included accessories we've got a VBI to VGA adapter, two dual molex to six pin PCIe connectors as well as a mini DP to full size display port adapter. We've also got our V checkpoint pieces so these plug into the V checkpoints on the card and these plug into your multi monitor leads. We have okay something... Oh no way! Find the GPU reactor card and have the obverse side of the card turned upward as illustrated to check the correct installation orientation first. You know what we're going to have to find out more about this GPU reactor. So GPU reactor basically increases the voltage stability and reduces ripple to the GPU for extreme overclocking. It is not required for air or even water operation but if you want to throw liquid nitrogen or dry ice at the problem then it's probably recommended to use it. We've got a driver disk, throw away that, download the latest off the AMD website, quick user guide and certificate of quality and stability. Now I've always kind of laughed at these certificates that get included with cards before because I actually didn't know what steps get thrown into something like military class 3. I actually happen 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 or liquid nitrogen cooling, bam, 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 drop it and that's like a falling down test. No, it's more to do with the components that went into the card than the actual finished end user product itself. And of course being a Hawk Edition card it looks ballin' out. So we've got dual 80mm PWM fans, once again this is with their dust reduction, spin 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 heat sink 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 card you can see clearly that there is a heat spreader covering the entire 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? Slick says yes. Slick says those are amazing. Okay just, oh man, see I'm like not letting you guys look at it because I'm trying to see them better. Sorry moving on. It's so cool. Okay, moving on to the back of the board. Here is the GPU reactor thingamabobber 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. Okay give me a sec here guys, I'm going to try and figure out 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 MSI. Oh and there's LEDs in here too so it's going to light up. And 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 slot to slot then it wouldn't really work that well but as long as you're running a single card or dual 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 heat spreader here over the front of the card, the unisync comes out like this and just has like a very nice look to it. MSI logo on the top. This still uses dual 6-pin PCIe 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 6-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 increase is necessarily that significant in a real world scenario. There's our V checkpoint 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. Okay let's have a look at the back of the card. So it supports up to four displays right out of the box. Two through DVI-HDMI and two through mini display port. Now if you can daisy chain them I believe you can support up to something like six displays by doing two monitors per display port but most monitors don't have support for that functionality just yet anyway. Support for Crossfire is limited to two-way configurations because there is only one Crossfire connector and I think that pretty much covers it. So it comes clocked at 1.1 GHz so even though it says GHz edition on the box or something like that what they really mean is GHz and more edition. This is a hawk card, it is pre-overclocked and comes with ample headroom for additional overclocking. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 7870 hawk edition and don't forget to subscribe to Learnest Tech Tips for more unboxing, reviews, and other computer videos.