MSI GeForce GTX 660 HAWK Details Emerge
MSI’s upcoming flagship GeForce GTX 660 graphics card, the N660GTX HAWK (MSI GeForce GTX 660 HAWK), has been sighted recently. Based on the 28 nm Kepler GK106 silicon, the card sports 960 CUDA cores running at 1,100 MHz (up from the stock 980 MHz) and the Boost speed has also been increased from 1,033 MHz all the way up to 1,176 MHz. This should make the card approximately 10 % faster than a reference GTX 660. The 2 GB of GDDR5 memory has been left at the stock speed of 1,500 MHz (6.00 GHz GDDR5 effective) and communicates across a 192-bit bus.
Although a factory-overclocked card, MSI has made several changes to allow further overclocking. The stock cooler has been replaced with the TwinFrozr IV which has four heatpipes transferring the heat to aluminium fin-stacks cooled by two 80 mm fans, and the card has an 8+2 phase fed by twin 6-pin PCIe power connectors. MSI’s GPU Reactor module sporting tantalum capacitors, first seen on the Radeon HD 7970 Lighting, makes a return on this card in order to ensure smooth power delivery.
A closer look at the PCB reveals that the MSI N660GTX HAWK comes with two EEPROM BIOS chips along with a switch to swap between the two at will. One BIOS is running at NVIDIA’s reference speeds as a fail-safe, while the other runs at the full overclocked speed of the card. Power regulation is taken care of by a high-end voltage controller which allows for software voltage control, and there is an array of voltage measure points consolidated at the end of the PCB near to the BIOS switch.
Display output is taken care of by four connectors – two DVI ports and one each of DisplayPort and HDMI. Two-way SLI will also be possible with any other GTX 660. Source — EXPreview
