|UnBoxing|MSI N460GTX HAWK "Talon Attack"

[ekovalsky]

Interesting... I ordered a N460GTX Hawk from Newegg when they dropped the price to $214.99 with a $20 rebate and free shipping. The Talon Attack was more and I didn't think it was worth it.

So I get the board and lo and behold it comes with factory clocks of 811 core, 1622 shaders, and 1950 memory. It has the Hynix GDDR5 1250Mhz ram chips and the Device ID in BIOS is 8600. So it is a Talon Attack, even though neither the box nor sticker says it.

Not sure if I just got lucky or if MSI is upgrading all the Hawk cards. I ordered another one for SLI so am hoping it is also a Talon Attack incognito.

If anyone was interested, this card is certainly a good overclocker although a little disappointing based on the 1GHz propaganda, which I suspect was achieved with some cherry picked GF104 silicon. Using Afterburner 2.1 beta which is limited to +100 mV on the core it will go to just over 900MHz. Unigine Heaven 2.1 (DX11, 2560x1600, 16AF, 4x AF, normal Tesselation) will crash before too long if I go beyond that. The memory is good to at least 2200Mhz with the +30 mV the latest Afterburner provides. At 2250 red artefacts appeared so I backed off. I haven't seen any effect from the PLL voltage so have the offset at zero.

Using NiBiTor 5.8 I did unlock the base Vcore from 0.987, and set it to 1.2125v. I used Nvidia Inspector to set the default Vcore to 1.125v which should net 1.2125v with +100 mV in Afterburner (which I understand controls a secondary VRG, which is not reflected in the Vcore reported by the sensor). This got me a little above 950Mhz and temps were still quite reasonable but the gains weren't that significant so I'm leaving well enough alone, and sticking with the 1.087v/900MHz available with Afterburner. Older versions of Afterburner allowed more offset for the Vcore and memory, with +100mV on the GDDR3 I did get 2250 stable.

If anyone is interested, overclocked as above the highest PScore with 3DVantage was about 17,500... not bad for a card with net cost of $195. Other than power used at load, I'm pleased with this purchase and glad I didn't hold out for the AMD Bart boards. Overclocking the 460 1GB to similar speeds as the 6870, I doubt there is much if any difference other than load power. And I prefer nVidia over AMD/ATI for SLI (over CFX), also I prefer nVidia's drivers and control panel.