NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 2GB Gaming Video Card 1080p Performance Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,113 words · ~10 min read
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okay guys it's new video card review time again so we're going to be taking a
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look in this video at the 1080p performance of the allnew GeForce GTX
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670 from NVIDIA so you can see here I've actually got a variety of GTX 670s uh
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most of which I did unboxings of already so you can see I've got a few reference
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cards this one's Factory overclocked this one's not this is one a direct
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NVIDIA card I've got them set up with a three-way SLI Bridge so that's a bit of
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a hint of what one of my other videos is going to be about I've also got a non-
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reference card so this is with a dual slot cooler this one's going to be cool
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because it's going to go head-to-head against a sapphire hd7950 that has a
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similarly designed cooler so we can take a look at them you know which one has
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more coil wine or less coil wine which one has the the better cooling solution
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since galaxy and Sapphire are both uh key partn for NVIDIA and AMD
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respectively this will be a really interesting head-to-head because these are similarly priced products now in
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terms of the overall mix I'm not testing
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a ton of games today guys and I apologize for that but honestly I just
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am a little bit a little bit constrained in terms of what I can do right now so
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I'm going to be doing crisis 2 Battlefield 3 Skyrim and Witcher 2 and
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this is the selection of cards that I'm going to be taking a look at we're going
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to be looking at the 1080p performance and then I'm going to have a separate
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video where I'm also going to cover things like the physical power and noise
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I'm going to take a look at 3D Vision performance compared to the last generation GTX 570 that this new 670
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replaces we're going to do an overse guide seeing what kind of performance we
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can get compared to a 680 as well as oh
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yeah there it is there's that hint there for the SLI scaling video now before I
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go any further yes I covered this in the unboxings but I just want to give you
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guys a brief overview so the 670 is basically a slightly cut down version of
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the GTX 680 NVIDIA has made fewer Cuts
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than usual however because it still has
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the 256 memory bit memory interface with
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6 GHz gddr5 it only has some of the Cuda
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cores cut away and a slight reduction in clock speed giving you um again that
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that slight performance reduction now you can see the reference cards are
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actually very short pcbs so these are very power efficient these are very cool
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running they don't need beefy coolers and you can see they only have dual six
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pin connectors even though these are high-end graphics cards this is cool too
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this is some of the other sort of slight finishing touches that you see from the
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board Partners Galaxy's gone ahead and put a slightly different back plate on
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theirs MSI has actually slightly
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adjusted the positioning of the slots compared to the reference one and
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uh yeah so let's get going shall we now
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there are a couple critical details before we really get started and that is
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test benches and the driver revisions that are are being used for so for the
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GTX 670 I'm using the publicly available
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beta driver 301.4c I'm using
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301.4c I'm using the latest 12.4 drivers
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my test bench is a 4.4 GHz 3930k from
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Intel so that is an overclocked processor with 16 gigs of Kingston
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hyperx RAM at DDR 3600 I'm using a
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Gigabyte uh what's it called x79 a UD
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x79 ud7 motherboard this is sort of like
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the spiritual successor to their previous generation OC board so that's
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uh going to allow me to run up to four
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graphics cards in SLI or Crossfire should the uh should the need arise and
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then for boot Drive using the Kronos Deluxe 120 gig and for the power supply
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the ZX 1250 wat 80 plus gold power
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supply from ocz will be dealing with that side of things for cooling I'm
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going to be using come on Focus please an h100 which will uh keep my processor
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at a reasonable temperature during all this testing for crisis 2 I'll be mixing
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things up a little bit I'm going to be using the ultra preset since all of the
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cards that I am using are very high-end
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cards I still hate motion blur so I'm keeping that on medium and I'm going to
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be using highres textures this time around once again to try and strain
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these cards as much as I can so I'm going to do this a little differently
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and I'm going to go one game at a time in terms of the analysis so here you can
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see the crisis 2 1080p P Ultra performance here is the GTX 670 which
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puts in a very very strong performance because while the average frames per
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second are below the 7970 check this out
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the actual minimum frame rate of the 670
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was above the hd7970 so that means that
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when you see a dip in the action you're going to see pretty much the same dip
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with a 670 as with a 7970 which is
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outstanding I mean remember too guys you know there's stuff that's sort of within
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margin of error here but uh in general that shows us that
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this is a very very strong card and when
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you compare it against its more similarly priced competitor the 7950 the
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difference becomes much more pronounced although bear in mind the 7950 is an
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outstanding overclocker which will allow it to uh put some distance between
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itself and the 7870 which at stock speed
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have well put it put on a pretty good show for this uh for this performance
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review as well for Battlefield 3 I'll be doing my usual two-minute run through in
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the comrades level in the parade and I will also be using Battlefield 3 to
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measure the maximum uh Power draw as
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well as maximum noise and load
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temperatures of the gpus now yes I realize these are not the maximum loads
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that I could create with this system but I'm looking for a more realistic
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scenario so what I'm going to do is I find a particular van in the parking lot
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when I'm done my run through and I shoot it until it starts smoking and some
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effects get going and that's how I've been able to generate a pretty good Peak
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power draw and then I'm going to sit there and stare at it and get all of
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those stats before I close the game also for Battlefield 3 we will be
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running everything on Ultra in Battlefield 3 the GTX 670 sits
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very comfortably with its competition the 7950 hold on let me just move that
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cursor so you can see that in terms of the average frame rate it is quite a bit
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higher than even than the 7950 and even
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is competitive with the 7970 although when the action gets intense you'll see
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a dip more like a 7950 as opposed to like a
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7970 and it sits sort of exactly where you'd expect it to be behind its younger
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brother the GTX 680 I think it should be noted that this is a huge generational
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leap in performance compared to the card that it's replacing I mean these are
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staggering numbers and you'll continue to see that throughout the rest of this
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performance evaluation of this card once again the 7870 puts on a pretty good
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show considering its price point though as well for Skyrim I'll be doing my
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usual two laps around the town of white run and I will be using Ultra presets
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which means everything you know all the view distances are at Max and everything
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is pretty Ultra and fabulous also I am using the
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stock highres texture pack now
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Battlefield 3 was a bit of an anomaly for me bear in mind guys I mentioned
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this before but I'm using a different driver on the GTX 6 7 than I am on the
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GTX 680 so I would expect that once the
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GTX 680 catches up in terms of the driver revisions that we're going to see
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um a similar performance boost however what this basically means is that at
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launch for all intents and purposes the GTX 670 is the fastest card that I
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tested in Battlefield 3 which is no uh
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no small matter and I mean you can see how much ahead it is of even the hd7970
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so if you play Battlefield 3 the GTX 670 is going to be one of the cards on your
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short list I think and once again staggering performance improvement over
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the last generation GTX 570 almost a doubling of minimum
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FPS The Witcher 2 is so demanding that I won't be altering my usual test setup so
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you guys can see here if my camera would ever Focus exactly what I am using to
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test these cards bearing in mind of course this is at 1080P and I'm doing my
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usual run through um which if you guys have seen it before then you know which
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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
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trees there's some buildings good stuff
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The Witcher is such a demanding game and the settings that I'm running it at are
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just totally unreasonable even for modern high-end cards but it still gives
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you an idea of where everything stands so in terms of average FPS the GTX 670
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Falls right in with the 7950 about where it's supposed to be we saw a bit of a
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dip but something to note about the witch is that it tends to just kind of
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randomly hitch up and and the the frames
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just sort of tank unexpectedly sometimes so I don't know how much you can really
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read into these minimum FPS I think that would explain why they're all kind of
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around the same level you know you can see the 7970 dips below even a
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7950 um so so sort of take take all of
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that with a grain of salt for this one I would be more interested in the average
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FPS and once again we see a sizable improvement over the previous generation
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and about an exp Ed gap between the GTX 670 and the GTX 680 so just a couple
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subjective things um the GTX 680
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exhibits a tiny bit of coil wine better than the reference cards from the red
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team that I have in my testing suite and uh better than the GTX 680 that I have
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um but both the 680 and the 670 uh do have a little do make a little bit more
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noise than the last generation cards um
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the fan has a bit of a had a bit of a grind has a bit of a grinding noise to
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it you can check out my other video on the noise temperatures and uh and power
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consumption of this card it is extremely efficient so power consumption wise it
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is very similar to a GTX 570 but it offers dramatically better performance
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and part of this maybe the smaller PCB I don't know but a huge part of it is
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definitely the Kepler GPU that it's got going on in there remember this card is
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also available in 4 gig configurations and if you're looking at running a giant
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resolution like a 2560x1440 or 2560 x600
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monitor or three monitors in surround I would definitely look at picking up the
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4 Gig version so thank you for checking out my performance review of the GTX 670
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from NVIDIA and don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips for more
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