MSI N460GTX HAWK Video Card Review

MSI N460GTX Features

The N460GTX HAWK is based upon NVIDIA’s new GF104 chip, which is a derivative of the GF100 chip used on previous NVIDIA cards. This is NVIDIA’s second chip derived from Fermi. It has 336 CUDA Processors or SPs. The N460GTX has 1GB of GDDR5 memory. With the way the memory partitions are organized this means that the card has a 256-bit memory bus.

One of the key technologies of this year is support for DirectX 11, which is the latest API from Microsoft for graphics cards. The key features of DirectX 11 include support for Hardware Tessellation, Direct Compute, Shader Model 5.0, Multi-threading and much more.  Games that take advantage of DirectX 11 on the market today include Aliens Versus Predator, Dirt 2, and a few other games with more arriving every day.

The GeForce GTX460 card has support for CUDA, PhysX, 3D Vision, 3D Vision Surround and these are all NVIDIA technologies. CUDA allows NVIDIA cards to do computational tasks like for Folding@Home using the CUDA cores operating as processors. Ageia developed PhysX and what it is a group of modules designed to add physics effects to games including destructible terrain, glass and smoke effects among other effects.  3D Vision allows you to use a pair of stereoscopic glasses to see a 3D image such as Avatar in 3D on your 120Hz screen. 3D Vision Surround allows you to use 3 monitors in conjunction with 3D vision to get 3D Vision surround gaming.

MSI specific features of this card include the Triple Overvoltage by afterburner, 7+1 Phase PWM design, the Twin Frozr II Thermal Design and the Military Class components. This is the first graphics card to support voltage adjustment of the GPU, the memory on the graphics card and the PLL voltage. MSI was able to reach 1GHz under air-cooling with this card and we shall see how high it goes on the bundle and overclocking page. The more power provided to the video card the better. The GeForce N460GTX HAWK has a 7+1 Phase PWM design providing an extra 30A of current power to the GPU for more stable overclocking.

The Twin Frozr II design was first implemented on the R5770 HAWK card. It consists of two PWM fans and four heat pipes to cool the graphics chip. The fans are whisper quiet with no noticeable increase in noise even under full load. The dual fans are of similar size to the single fans found on most other video cards. The base for the heat pipes is nickel-plated copper to provide better heat dissipation over the standard cooler. MSI says it will be 18db quieter and 18C cooler than a reference GTX460.

The other feature of this card is the Military class components. MSI has gone with All Solid Capacitors on the GTX460 HAWK to provide a longer lifespan than the traditional capacitors. The Hi-Capacity capacitors on the N460GTX HAWK are designed to give more precise voltage over traditional capacitors. The HAWK card also has Super Ferrite Chokes which has a higher current for better overclocking ability. Many of these features are normally found on motherboards not video cards, but with the focus on Military class components MSI has applied them to cards like the HAWK.

Triple Over Voltage by Afterburner

Twin FROZR II Cooling

Dual PWM fans

4 heat pipes

Nickel-plated copper base

7+1 Phase PWM design

Military Class Components

780MHz core clock speed

1800MHz Shader Clock speed

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