Today we look at another GeForce GTX 670. In this review we'll look at a board from MSI, it is the Power edition model that comes factory overclocked and it armed with the all new TwinFrozr IV cooler. The GeForce GTX 670 is the little brother of the GTX 680 and comes, well how to put it ... slightly castrated as NVIDIA disabled a couple of shader processors. The card itself is still quite beefy in terms of performance though, which you'll understand once we sifted through the specifications. The GK104 GPU based graphics card has one SM/SMX cluster disabled. This gives the GK104 GPU 1344 CUDA cores to work with, with in total, 112 texture and 32 raster operating units. The (reference) graphics card also has slightly slower clock frequencies than big poppa GTX 680, with a reference baseclock speed of 915 MHz. However the GTX 670 comes with a Boost clock as well which is set at 980 MHz -- not far off from the GTX 680 at all. MSI released two SKUs based on the GTX 670:
We have the 2GB Power Edition in house which comes pre-overclocked at 1020 MHz on the baseclock and 1089 MHz (misprinted in the chart below) on the boost clock. To give the card enough frame buffer to work with the cards are equipped with 2048 GDDR5 on a 256-bits wide bus.  MSI clocks this memory reference at 6008MHz (effective data rate). As you will notice while looking at the PCB (later on in the article) we think there will be 4 GB model out soon as well, albeit we're not sure if the memory on these models will get a factory tweak. We can only recommend you 4GB version if you have a very high-resolution monitor and mod your games like Skyrim with extreme HQ texture packs. Otherwise 2GB is more than sufficient. The power edition however brings all the goodness that is the GeForce GTX 670, a very powerful card. Armed with the new Twin Frozr IV cooler it runs cool and silent as well. The new dual 8cm PWM fan based cooler comes with Dust removal technology, basically when you startup the PC the fans will rotate backwards for 30 seconds clearing dust from the cooling solution. To top it off, MSI applied their Military Class III component usage making sure that only the best is used on the graphics card. With that said you have the more important variables in your mindset, have a peek at the product after we dive right into the review, next page please. MSI has a great product at hand with the Power edition of the GeForce GTX 670. The GeForce GTX 670 seen as a default product obviously already is a very strong product. We find it to be a much more appealing product compared to the GTX 680 really, the price is much better and the performance really doesn't differ that much. So MSI now closes the gap towards the GTX 680 with the GTX 670 Power Edition /OC model. The reference baseclock at 1019 is really nice, but the magic is to be found in the boost clock. That one is set at 1089 MHz. MSI however also increased the power limitation a little (over reference) and as such we noticed that at times the boost lock even closed in on 1150~1200 MHz. So in fillrate limited games you are going to see some interesting stuff, even surpassing the GTX 680 (reference). Once you load up applications with the more GPU intensive scenarios then this card card and the GTX 680 seem to perform roughly equal. Not bad for a 420 USD product. Bare in mind that MSI 'might' release two power edition SKUs. Though I'm not 100% sure, but look for "/OC" in the Power edition product naming as that's the one as tested today with the high GPU clocks. Judging from a spec sheet I have seen a regular 'Power Edition' card could get default reference clocks. So who's the card intended for? Well ... the GeForce GTX 670 Power Edition /OC is a very nice performer that is very capable for gamers at a monitor resolution of 1920x1080/1200 versus the newest and latest games. Overall the card is just magic for the 1920x1080 and 1920x1200 range in monitor resolution, there's not a game out there that it can't deal with at this resolution. Anno 2070 at the best quality settings and 4xAA pushes 87 frames per second on average at 1920x1200, and still 55 fps at 2560X1600. In Crysis 2 we end at an average of 63 FPS in 1920x1200 with Ultra quality settings and that high resolution texture package and 4x AA. Battlefield 3 is another example, with all eye candy opened up in game and again at 4xAA the card still pushes 57 FPS at 19x12 and that is equal to the GeForce GTX 680. So while this product might have once shader cluster less, really the performance remains exceptionally good and once the dynamic clock aka turbo kicks in, the card easily functions in the 1100 MHz range. The reference product run into 78 Degrees C while gaming which means the cooling performance is sufficient, but just that. The Power Edition /OC is equipped with the Twin Frozr IV cooler and that certainly is a great offering. During gaming expect to see 65 Degrees C as your maximum The reference cooler also is a notch more noisy compared to the GTX 680 and makes a low-noise hum. Again the Twin Frozr IV cooler on this graphics makes the product very silent. These are two major positives. By the way, once you startup the PC the cooler is noisy for roughly 30 seconds, then it will throttle down to silent levels. this is the anti-dust technology at work, spinning the fans backwards at high RPM to dump dust -- so you can now clean that dust of your other components :) Overclocking: the two 6-pin PEG power connectors indicates that the power circuitry can handle less tweaking wise. The MSI GTX 670 power Edition /OC however already comes factory overclocked. With further manual overclocking another +75 MHz maybe +100 could be added to the baseclock and then the Dynamic Clock Adjustment technology kicks in, resulting into give or take 1200~1300 MHz on the clock where the power envelope allows it. In closing, we feel that the MSI GeForce GTX 670 Power edition /OC with new model Twin Frozr IV cooler is an exemplary product. It offers a lot of performance in its default setup and most of the tweaking has been done for you already. Performance wise you are in the upper most high-end region of single GPU based performance. With one monitor at say 1920x1200 or 2560x1440/1600 this card will play any modern age game really well in combo with good image quality settings. Combined with low noise levels, low heat levels and really good looks we can't do anything other than to recommend it to you guys, it's a really lovely product. |
