okay guys it's new video card review time again so we're going to be taking a
look in this video at the 1080p performance of the allnew GeForce GTX
670 from NVIDIA so you can see here I've actually got a variety of GTX 670s uh
most of which I did unboxings of already so you can see I've got a few reference
cards this one's Factory overclocked this one's not this is one a direct
NVIDIA card I've got them set up with a three-way SLI Bridge so that's a bit of
a hint of what one of my other videos is going to be about I've also got a non-
reference card so this is with a dual slot cooler this one's going to be cool
because it's going to go head-to-head against a sapphire hd7950 that has a
similarly designed cooler so we can take a look at them you know which one has
more coil wine or less coil wine which one has the the better cooling solution
since galaxy and Sapphire are both uh key partn for NVIDIA and AMD
respectively this will be a really interesting head-to-head because these are similarly priced products now in
terms of the overall mix I'm not testing
a ton of games today guys and I apologize for that but honestly I just
am a little bit a little bit constrained in terms of what I can do right now so
I'm going to be doing crisis 2 Battlefield 3 Skyrim and Witcher 2 and
this is the selection of cards that I'm going to be taking a look at we're going
to be looking at the 1080p performance and then I'm going to have a separate
video where I'm also going to cover things like the physical power and noise
I'm going to take a look at 3D Vision performance compared to the last generation GTX 570 that this new 670
replaces we're going to do an overse guide seeing what kind of performance we
can get compared to a 680 as well as oh
yeah there it is there's that hint there for the SLI scaling video now before I
go any further yes I covered this in the unboxings but I just want to give you
guys a brief overview so the 670 is basically a slightly cut down version of
the GTX 680 NVIDIA has made fewer Cuts
than usual however because it still has
the 256 memory bit memory interface with
6 GHz gddr5 it only has some of the Cuda
cores cut away and a slight reduction in clock speed giving you um again that
that slight performance reduction now you can see the reference cards are
actually very short pcbs so these are very power efficient these are very cool
running they don't need beefy coolers and you can see they only have dual six
pin connectors even though these are high-end graphics cards this is cool too
this is some of the other sort of slight finishing touches that you see from the
board Partners Galaxy's gone ahead and put a slightly different back plate on
theirs MSI has actually slightly
adjusted the positioning of the slots compared to the reference one and
uh yeah so let's get going shall we now
there are a couple critical details before we really get started and that is
test benches and the driver revisions that are are being used for so for the
GTX 670 I'm using the publicly available
beta driver 301.4c I'm using
301.4c I'm using the latest 12.4 drivers
my test bench is a 4.4 GHz 3930k from
Intel so that is an overclocked processor with 16 gigs of Kingston
hyperx RAM at DDR 3600 I'm using a
Gigabyte uh what's it called x79 a UD
x79 ud7 motherboard this is sort of like
the spiritual successor to their previous generation OC board so that's
uh going to allow me to run up to four
graphics cards in SLI or Crossfire should the uh should the need arise and
then for boot Drive using the Kronos Deluxe 120 gig and for the power supply
the ZX 1250 wat 80 plus gold power
supply from ocz will be dealing with that side of things for cooling I'm
going to be using come on Focus please an h100 which will uh keep my processor
at a reasonable temperature during all this testing for crisis 2 I'll be mixing
things up a little bit I'm going to be using the ultra preset since all of the
cards that I am using are very high-end
cards I still hate motion blur so I'm keeping that on medium and I'm going to
be using highres textures this time around once again to try and strain
these cards as much as I can so I'm going to do this a little differently
and I'm going to go one game at a time in terms of the analysis so here you can
see the crisis 2 1080p P Ultra performance here is the GTX 670 which
puts in a very very strong performance because while the average frames per
second are below the 7970 check this out
the actual minimum frame rate of the 670
was above the hd7970 so that means that
when you see a dip in the action you're going to see pretty much the same dip
with a 670 as with a 7970 which is
outstanding I mean remember too guys you know there's stuff that's sort of within
margin of error here but uh in general that shows us that
this is a very very strong card and when
you compare it against its more similarly priced competitor the 7950 the
difference becomes much more pronounced although bear in mind the 7950 is an
outstanding overclocker which will allow it to uh put some distance between
itself and the 7870 which at stock speed
have well put it put on a pretty good show for this uh for this performance
review as well for Battlefield 3 I'll be doing my usual two-minute run through in
the comrades level in the parade and I will also be using Battlefield 3 to
measure the maximum uh Power draw as
well as maximum noise and load
temperatures of the gpus now yes I realize these are not the maximum loads
that I could create with this system but I'm looking for a more realistic
scenario so what I'm going to do is I find a particular van in the parking lot
when I'm done my run through and I shoot it until it starts smoking and some
effects get going and that's how I've been able to generate a pretty good Peak
power draw and then I'm going to sit there and stare at it and get all of
those stats before I close the game also for Battlefield 3 we will be
running everything on Ultra in Battlefield 3 the GTX 670 sits
very comfortably with its competition the 7950 hold on let me just move that
cursor so you can see that in terms of the average frame rate it is quite a bit
higher than even than the 7950 and even
is competitive with the 7970 although when the action gets intense you'll see
a dip more like a 7950 as opposed to like a
7970 and it sits sort of exactly where you'd expect it to be behind its younger
brother the GTX 680 I think it should be noted that this is a huge generational
leap in performance compared to the card that it's replacing I mean these are
staggering numbers and you'll continue to see that throughout the rest of this
performance evaluation of this card once again the 7870 puts on a pretty good
show considering its price point though as well for Skyrim I'll be doing my
usual two laps around the town of white run and I will be using Ultra presets
which means everything you know all the view distances are at Max and everything
is pretty Ultra and fabulous also I am using the
stock highres texture pack now
Battlefield 3 was a bit of an anomaly for me bear in mind guys I mentioned
this before but I'm using a different driver on the GTX 6 7 than I am on the
GTX 680 so I would expect that once the
GTX 680 catches up in terms of the driver revisions that we're going to see
um a similar performance boost however what this basically means is that at
launch for all intents and purposes the GTX 670 is the fastest card that I
tested in Battlefield 3 which is no uh
no small matter and I mean you can see how much ahead it is of even the hd7970
so if you play Battlefield 3 the GTX 670 is going to be one of the cards on your
short list I think and once again staggering performance improvement over
the last generation GTX 570 almost a doubling of minimum
FPS The Witcher 2 is so demanding that I won't be altering my usual test setup so
you guys can see here if my camera would ever Focus exactly what I am using to
test these cards bearing in mind of course this is at 1080P and I'm doing my
usual run through um which if you guys have seen it before then you know which
run through I'm talking about and if you haven't then you don't but it's pretty good there's some combat there's some
trees there's some buildings good stuff
The Witcher is such a demanding game and the settings that I'm running it at are
just totally unreasonable even for modern high-end cards but it still gives
you an idea of where everything stands so in terms of average FPS the GTX 670
Falls right in with the 7950 about where it's supposed to be we saw a bit of a
dip but something to note about the witch is that it tends to just kind of
randomly hitch up and and the the frames
just sort of tank unexpectedly sometimes so I don't know how much you can really
read into these minimum FPS I think that would explain why they're all kind of
around the same level you know you can see the 7970 dips below even a
7950 um so so sort of take take all of
that with a grain of salt for this one I would be more interested in the average
FPS and once again we see a sizable improvement over the previous generation
and about an exp Ed gap between the GTX 670 and the GTX 680 so just a couple
subjective things um the GTX 680
exhibits a tiny bit of coil wine better than the reference cards from the red
team that I have in my testing suite and uh better than the GTX 680 that I have
um but both the 680 and the 670 uh do have a little do make a little bit more
noise than the last generation cards um
the fan has a bit of a had a bit of a grind has a bit of a grinding noise to
it you can check out my other video on the noise temperatures and uh and power
consumption of this card it is extremely efficient so power consumption wise it
is very similar to a GTX 570 but it offers dramatically better performance
and part of this maybe the smaller PCB I don't know but a huge part of it is
definitely the Kepler GPU that it's got going on in there remember this card is
also available in 4 gig configurations and if you're looking at running a giant
resolution like a 2560x1440 or 2560 x600
monitor or three monitors in surround I would definitely look at picking up the
4 Gig version so thank you for checking out my performance review of the GTX 670
from NVIDIA and don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips for more
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