 Buy an Intel NUC barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game items for Planet Side 2. Click now to learn more. Now I know there's been a lot of high-end graphics card stuff lately and we've focused a lot on $500, $600 cards that most people can't afford. Now it's time to come back to reality. So with the recent price drops especially, GTX 760s are looking pretty appealing and I can't think of many that are better than MSI's Hawk Edition. So it's clocked at 1.176 GHz, it's got 2 gigs of 6 GHz GDDR5 memory just like pretty much any other GTX 760 would and it has a very unique implementation as we've come to expect from Hawk cards over the last several years. So let's go ahead and get this baby opened up and find out what's inside. So first we've got some accessories which hopefully I can figure out how to actually open here. There we go. So there's a quick user's guide as well as a disc that you should throw away, a DVI to VGA adapter that you should throw away, V checkpoint connectors. So those are for checking actual voltages right on the PCB using the V checkpoints as well as apparently a guide and some, oh cool these are handy, two 6-pin to 8-pin PCI express adapters. Those are going in the handy stuff bin after this. Alright so after that we have the card itself. So it supports all the standard GTX 760 stuff. So GPU boost 2.0, dynamically adjusting the clocks according to power thresholds, temperature thresholds and making sure that the fan speed stays under control. Game stream which is with any Kepler card the ability to stream your games from your PC to an Nvidia shield or to, well to an Nvidia shield or through your TV, or to your TV through an Nvidia shield. So that's game stream and shadow play which uses the onboard H.264 encoder to record your games locally or stream to Twitch.TV with almost no performance hit. Although it should be noted that not all games are supported yada yada etc etc but it's a great way to stream games as long as they are supported versus having there be a huge performance drop. Alright so let's talk about the cooler. Right there my friends are two 100mm fans with their propeller blades so they have that smoother plastic on the outside. They spin the other way upon startup to pull dust out of that massive cooler. So that's actually a 5 heat pipe cooler. There's four of them that come out the bottom so you can see those four down there. And then there's an additional super pipe on the top so that's an 8mm heat pipe that carries heat as far away from the GPU core as it possibly can towards the back of the card. They are claiming it runs up to 10 degrees Celsius cooler and up to around 16 decibels quieter. We were able to validate that it does run dramatically cooler than a reference card. We don't have a decibel meter unfortunately so we weren't able to validate that it runs quieter but it does run extremely quietly so I wouldn't be concerned about this card being loud. On the top you find two 8 pin PCI express connectors. I would go ahead and say that that's probably totally unnecessary but that does in theory allow this card to draw more power therefore delivering more power to the GPU and other components and in theory overclock better. In fact we did get a slightly better overclock out of the GTX 760 hawk compared to our reference card which you'll see in the overclocking results and benchmarks at the end of this video. On the back of the card we find a backplate. I kind of, I kind of you know was not that sold on backplates for a while but I think I've started liking them again. They look quite nice and this is kind of a first for MSI. It's the first time I've seen it but a matte black PCB. The PCB on this card is absolutely gorgeous. We've seen a lot of dark brown PCBs trying to pass for black PCBs from MSI and that is not what they've done here. There's a bio switch right here that goes from standard mode to liquid nitrogen mode depending on what kind of crazy benchmarking you're doing on it and they've completely redesigned the entire PCB so it has a 6 plus 2 phase power design that is to say 6 phases for the GPU itself, 2 phases for the RAM and nothing left of the original reference design. It's got a PCI express 3.0 16x connector down here, it has 2 SLI fingers at the top supporting up to 3 way SLI and then over on the IO side you've got 2 DVI ports, HDMI and display ports so that's full support for Nvidia 3D vision surround with one additional auxiliary display. It uses military class 4 components so that means driver MOSFET so that's a driver and a MOSFET in one unit and then they've also got their copper MOSFETs for faster heat dissipation Hi-C caps and finally their dark caps which are aluminum capacitors, they're claiming up to a 10 year lifespan or something ridiculous like that. Software wise it supports their triple over voltage feature so they have a few cards that they kind of slip under the Nvidia green light blanket of not too much overvolting and all that stuff so you can overvolt the GPU, the RAM as well as the PLL so you can really fine tune your overclock and that's all supported through MSI Afterburner which around here at Linus Tech Tips is our favorite Nvidia GeForce graphics card overclocking utility. Remember you can use MSI Afterburner on any graphics card as long as it doesn't have a weird VRM solution that's not supported by it so not just on MSI cards although if you want to support the guys that build great utilities then you might want to buy an MSI card so that you know that all those good things can happen. Alright so performance we used our standard test bench with our 6 core processor 12 gigs or 16 gigs of RAM I think are running on it these days, some SSD and anyway here are the benchmark results so you can see here that our 760 hawk edition does slightly outperform our standard card. All of this while in my personal opinion looking absolutely fantastic, being extremely quiet and running extremely cool. We only ran a few games because there's not really a whole lot to say about it. It should be noted guys that we do overclock all of our cards so at stock this card will outperform the reference card by a little bit more but once you overclock both of them the gap does tend to narrow a little bit if you aren't doing anything extreme on the cooling side or the overclocking, tweaking and tuning side. Remember guys overclocking is always luck of the draw so there's no guarantee that your hawk will overclock better than a standard card or that your standard card will overclock at all but it tends to be that the better designed cards with beefier VRM and more power and all that stuff do tend to overclock a little bit better. One more thing I missed here at the back of the card those are those V checkpoints so you can actually check the exact voltages of various components with a multimeter rather than relying on software tools and I think that is pretty much it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and review of the GTX 760 hawk edition from MFSI. 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