Inno3D rectifies GeForce GTX 470's shortcomings with Hawk card

The card

Inno3D's recipe for concocting the perfect GeForce GTX 470 lies with mounting a huge cooler on top of a standard PCB. The cooler is a custom-designed model that looks much like the Accelero XTREME from Arctic Cooling.

Arctic's premium VGA coolers implement a trio of 92mm fans. The Hawk's cooler, meanwhile, uses two 80mm fans and a central 90mm, all temperature-controlled, and positioned on top of a chunky heatsink that houses five heatpipes. Inno3D reckons it's good enough to reduce under load temperatures by over 20 per cent - 70°C vs. 92°C - when under the cosh.

Measuring 260mm x 114mm x 53mm (W x D x H), the heatsink is larger than the underlying PCB and would cover a GeForce GTX 480 entirely. The cooler's height means that the Hawk is a three-slot-taking card.

Seeing it in all its glory, the weighty heatsink is kept in place by a small rubber insert between it and the RAM heastinks that cover the 10 memory chips which make up the card's complement of 1,280MB.

The Hawk uses a standard dual six-pin power arrangement. Inno3D plays the frequency game safe by clocking the card at default GeForce GTX 470 frequencies of 607MHz core and 3,348MHz memory and then letting you push it to the limit, which is helped by having voltage control over the GPU.

The cooler's design means that most of the hot air is circulated around in the chassis rather than being expelled through the back. Outputs are standard for a GeForce GTX 470, that is, twin dual-link DVI and mini-HDMI.

Inno3D throws in some flashy packaging but doesn't include a triple-A in the bundle. The mouse mat, whilst nice enough, seems like an afterthought.

Summary

Take a GeForce GTX 470, use a custom heatsink and let the purchaser overclock the card, appears to the be the Inno3D way with the Hawk.

Review: Inno3D rectifies GeForce GTX 470's shortcomings with Hawk card

The card

MY HEXUS

EVENTS

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