MSI/Corsair Sea Hawk - is it worth the extra dough?

[James5121]

Upon receiving my paycheque and seeing that I had close to $800 (CDN) I had decided that it was time to upgrade from my EVGA GTX 970 FTW to a more "hip" card. My choices ranged. Did I want to stick with maxwell and go up to a 980 or should I join the pascal army? This of course was a rhetorical question seeing as my local computer store still sells its 980s for the same price as a 1080 which was still out of my price range.

 

My choices were, A. A 1060 and another SSD or B. A 1070. I decided against the 1060 as I would essentially be losing performance. Like upgrading from a 2008 Ferrari to a 2012 Honda Civic. Sure it's newer and may have more features, but it's slower nonetheless.

 

Now picking a 1070 was hard, I had many options. Do I stick with EVGA and rig my existing Kraken G10 and H80i to it or do I go with a reference (sorry, "founders edition") card or do I go for a hybrid model? Unfortunately my computer shop doesn't sell the EVGA hybrid cards but they DID however sell the MSI Sea Hawk cards. These cards were a whole $100 (CDN) more than the founders edition but I couldn't bear to see a GPU hit anywhere from 50° to 80° after seeing my 970 stay in the frosty 20° to 30° range.

 

So I picked up the Sea Hawk. Brought it home, took off the included Corsair fan with white LEDs and installed the 120mm radiator with 2 Fractal Desigm HP12s running push pull. Then I over clocked it to a nice round 2Ghz. After over clocking I decided to run some benchmarks. I ran firestrike in all three modes and came up with the results of: 

Fire Strike (normal): www.3dmark.com/3dm/14657863? (Score: 14,730)
Fire Strike (extreme): www.3dmark.com/3dm/14657913? (Score: 8,002)
Fire Strike (ultra): www.3dmark.com/3dm/14657955? (Score: 4,342)

 

All three tests ran perfectly with no issue and didn't even crack 40° with corsair link set to quiet mode, meaning all my fans were barely spinning. 

If if you're wondering what it's like to game on this GPU, one word, excellent. Can't take my word for it, watch these videos, all games are played on maximum settings at 2560x1080 (yes that's an ultra wide display )

 

Doom:

GTAV:

 

I think all in all, it was a good purchase. 

 

Thanks for reading. If you'd like a video review, please let me know down below. :-) 

Edited September 6, 2016 by James5121
added videos

[iTonyy]

So news, much wow.

[vanished]

-moved to Member Reviews-

and I apologize for our misleadingly named tech news section