NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 is an amazing piece of hardware

NVIDIA continues the rollout of Kepler and takes on the best AMD can offer with the second highest end single GPU card in its GeForce line up.

 

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670

The folks at Nvidia have been busy little bees this month, offering solutions both above and below the performance of the popular and powerful GTX 680. The GTX 670, Nvidias latest addition to the Kepler family is comprised of 1344 CUDA cores, sports a 256-Bit memory bus, and holds the same 2GB VRAM as the reference GTX 680.

The stock clock Nvidia have chosen for the GTX 670 is a little lower than that of the GTX 680 (to be expected) coming in at 915MHz. This is undoubtedly to keep the cards performance lower - if you crank up the clock to 1GHz like its big brother, there really is only the smallest of differences between the two cards at most resolutions.

 

The GTX 670 has a boost clock of 994MHz by default, though with some playing around we managed to get a core/boost clock of 1150/1230. We're confident many cards will go higher, but for now we're calling that as what you can expect from an average GTX 670.

Power consumption is down rather healthily, given it is a neutered GTX 680 (missing 1 core cluster) and also sports a lower core and memory frequency (and therefore lower voltage). We would hazard a guess at 125W for total card power draw under load, though without a very expensive power meter, we can only guess how much power draw the GPU alone is responsible for when analysing the entire system draw (~245W).

So far it seems the GPU Boost technology is identical to that of the GTX 680, the only difference being a slightly higher boost ratio. The GTX 670 has a boost ratio of around 80MHz by default, where the GTX 680 uses a 50MHz boost.

As for the design of the card, we can see that the GTX 670 uses a very short PCB, measuring in at only 17.5CM. The rest of the cards 24.5CM length is made up of the GPU cooler. We're not sure if Nvidia included the longer cooler because they thought the GPU needed the extra cooling, or if they simply didn't want their second best GPU to appear so small. After all, for a video card to be good, it has to be big, right?

The PCB is impressively short for such a powerful card, with the cooler itself adding significantly to the length of the reference design

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The only place this card falls down against the HD7970 is in super-HD resolutions. That is, resolutions at or above 2560x1440. The 3GB of VRAM does help at these large resolutions, especially in multi-monitor setups. Keep that in mind if you don't use anything above 1920x1200, and if you are only using a regular HD monitor, perhaps you should consider a lower-teir card, as even the GTX 670 is still slight overkill.

Even with the long cooler, the GTX 670 is shorter than the HD 7950

	FPS Avg	FPS Min	FPS Max
Unigine Heaven (2560 x 1440)	30	22	69
3DMark 11 (score)	P8413	-	-
Arkham City (2560 x 1440)	49	36	63
Battlefield 3 (2560 x 1440)	37	26	51