It is quite interesting to see that there is an extensive shift towards the more high-end and enthusiast products in the past year or so. It seems that next to good performance and features, the end-users like to tweak more and more as well. Well that and they want the "good stuff". MSI is exhibiting that on all fronts, with their motherboards but of course also with their graphics cards.

And even when a graphics card is segmented in the mid-range .. they know precisely how to pimp it up in order to bring you a very attractive product at an okay price. Yeah, rock-solid designs with no compromises at all. However we are gurus and we like to see things with a little niche and that x-factor. As such it's always with the greatest pleasure that we review the more customized products.

In that context MSI just released their HAWK edition Radeon HD 6870 graphics card and well, the only thing left original is the actual GPU as everything else was changed. We see a custom PCB with phase LEDs, voltage monitoring points, military class components and to put some icing on the cake, the all new TwinFrz III heatpipe cooler that is bound to bring good temperatures versus low noise levels.

It doesn't end there though, MSI is pre-overclocking this 1024MB HAWK model towards 930 MHz. And then there's the overclock potential, a new voltage regulation circuitry was embedded, allowing not only to play and tweak around with GPU voltages, nope ... they added voltage control for the memory and Auxilary/PLL voltage as well.

As a result this graphics card can get overclocked to 950 MHz easily, and if you apply a little voltage tweaking with the help of Afterburner, 1 GHz is without doubt a threshold you can pass. All in all definitely something you want to check out.

Have a peek and then let's head into the review ... next page please.