MSI Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition R7870 HAWK Video Card

Comment:
It can play any game I put to it. Far Cry3 is great. I haven't benchmarked my system but it's all new MSI and intel stuff. I don't think the card is noisy, it's not gotten hot enough to crank the dual fans up and I let it auto run with a slight over clock. For the price I think it's a great deal and it looks really good. All the reviews I have read on the net were quite positive. I had no install issues so I don't understand why anyone else would. Maybe they aren't geek enough to know how to do a proper install? You can pay more for a card but is it really required,,,,,,I don't think so. This review was modfied by poster @ 12-20-12 10:59 PM

Comment:
I picked this card up based on online reviews being over the moon about it, and it was on sale. First time I dropped it in I was greeted by massive tearing across the desktop which would not go away unless I uninstalled Catalyst Control Center from my system.I then ran into issues where adobe flash would cause the drivers to crash when opening a video unless I hovered my mouse over the current tab and shut it down quickly. If I didn't it required a restart to recover.Now to game performance, this card comes factory overclocked out of the box, which one would assume would increase game performance. Not for me, every title I loaded up showed the GPU at 100% usage and the game would chug along at 15-20fps from Farcry 3, Battlefield 3, MoH: Warfighter to Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. I found undoing the factory overclock relieved the gpu usage issue but defeated the purpose of buying a video card that is designed to be overclocked.I have tested this card with 12.8, 12.10, 12.11 Beta 8 and 12.11 Beta 11. 12.8 is the only driver that this card will work on my system without these issues, but any game released after August runs unbearably bad if at all.I exchanged my first card for another one hoping it was a flaw with the card. However the second one behaves identically.I will be returning this card on the 19th and picking up the "XFX Radeon HD 7870 Double D" like I should have in the first place. I've had 3 XFX cards (4850, and dual 5850's in crossfire), and they all ran without flaw. I should have known better than to be tempted by the cooler. System specs:Phenom X6 1050T d 3.8GhzM4A89GTD-Pro/USB38GB corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600

Comment:
Good card for its price. It has room to overclock and is quite cool. Only downside is the fan noise becomes quite noticeable when its 50%+Shouldn't be a problem with a good headset/headphones, though.