Galaxy GeForce GTX 670 2GB Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,649 words · ~8 min read
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Welcome to my unboxing and first look at something that's very exciting. This is
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the Galaxy GeForce GTX 670. It supports
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a wide variety of exciting features, most of which you can actually find out
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about on my Galaxy GTX 680 unboxing as
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well as review and all the other videos I did about it. because the 670 is
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actually very similar to the 680 in many ways. Now, sure, it doesn't have quite
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as many CUDA cores. It only has 1,344.
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Sure, it's not clocked quite as high with a boost clock that's generally in
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the neighborhood of around 980 MHz, although GPU boost doesn't necessarily,
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you know, nail it down to an exact frequency at any given time. And
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sure, it might look a little different, and more on that in a moment, but in
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terms of the performance, in terms of the memory speed, in terms of the memory
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bus, this is the first time in a while we haven't seen a a step down card from
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the flagship single GPU that is actually using the same memory bus at the same
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frequency. So, it has six gigahertz DDDR5 memory with a 256 bit bus. Um,
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it's using the Right, right, right. So, the reason that most of the features are
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very similar is because it is using the same GK 104 core that the GTX 680 is
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using, although slightly cut down in terms of the functional units, the CUDA
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cores and the clock speed. But other than that, this is almost a GTX 680,
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although the key difference is that it comes at a more attractive price. So,
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you can see it actually looks very similar as well. More on that in a
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moment. So, let's just have a look at what Galaxy includes with their GTX 670.
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In here, we find slick all black packaging. I'm a big fan of packaging,
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as you guys probably know, if you've watched a few of my videos. I unpackage
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a lot of products, so I do recognize good packaging when I see it. Got nice
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little individually packaged zip locky things going on here. So, we got a DVI
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to VGA adapter. We have uh two dual
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Molex to six pin PCIe adapters. So that probably tells us that this card uses
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dual six pin PCIe power adapters as well as a graphics card driver installation
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disc. Although you should download the latest and finally a setup guide, easy
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setup for quick installation for GeForce GTX 600 series pamphlet and
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then a user's manual. So that pretty much covers it. Attention customers,
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thank you for purchasing your blah blah blah. Be sure to register your card within 30 days of purchase to receive an
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extended warranty. So Galaxy does provide up to I believe it's three
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years. Yes, 3 years of warranty if you extend if you uh register your card
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right away. So, let's go ahead and I
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don't know how this works. So, I'll figure that out later.
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Now, let's get to the card itself. So, first let's do a brief rundown. And
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yeah, I'm totally going to look over there and use my cheat sheet because that's how I roll of the features that
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the GTX 670 includes that were first introduced on the 680. So we've got uh
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GPU boost which means that it dynamically according to the TDP that is
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the thermal design envelope of this particular card as well as the power
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envelope is going to adjust assuming that your GPU is running cool enough and
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your board is not consuming too much power like if you're using something
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like Firmark then it would know that well that's not a real game and it's
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drawing more power than is realistic. GPU boost will dynamically adjust the
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frequency of your GPU in order to make the best use of the power and the heat
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envelope that it has available to it. So GPU boost is definitely present on the
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670. We also have FXA has been added to
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the NVIDIA control panel, although that's accessible to for many different cards. Now adaptive VSYNC is one that's
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really cool. So, adaptive VSYNC allows you to either be using VSYNC when your
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frame rate is way way above the refresh rate of your monitor, whether it's 60 or
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120 or whatever the case may be. So, it will turn VSYNC on to eliminate tearing.
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So, that is when your GPU draws the top
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half of the screen and the bottom half of the screen in the middle of a monitor
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refresh and you see like there's a guy standing there and he's like slightly
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disconnected at the waist. So, that's tearing. So the VSIC will turn on when
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you're up there and then when you are below 60, let's say 60 for our
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hypothetical in most monitors, most LCDs are 60 Hz. When you're below 60 Hz, it
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will no longer have to drop you all the way down to 30 if your GPU is capable of
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pushing 55 frames per second, which is how VSYNC works. So it turns VSync off
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as soon as you fall below that threshold. So you get the best of both worlds. So that's adaptive VSYNC. TXA is
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uh basically more
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What do they what do they what do they sort of call it pretty much um the
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performance of yeah see I'm mode one
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right two times
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multi-sampling AA performance and it looks like eight times AA so that's
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basically that and then mode two is you
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know what hold on give me a sec I couldn't read my little chart from too
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far away so mode one is the performance hit of two times anti-aliasing and it
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looks about like eight times anti-aliasing And then mode two looks
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even better than that and is about the same performance hit as four times
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anti-aliasing. So that is also present on this card. Next, we have full support
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for NVIDIA 3D vision surround off of a
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single card. So you can go one, two, three displays with an auxiliary
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display. No big deal. So you want to run your three displays and then your
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auxiliary one can't run the game at the same time. It's not for surround gaming.
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But if you had like, you know, a chat window open or like system monitoring
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utilities or stuff open on that fourth monitor, then you can totally run that
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one as well. So up to 3 + 1 displays is
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also supported on this card. 4K monitor support as well as HDMI 1.4A that
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includes 3D, which is very, very cool stuff. Better Physics performance. And
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we're pretty much there. Now, let's have a look at the card itself. So, it uses a
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similar blower design cooler, which also includes the acoustic dampening um
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hoo-ha that NVIDIA included with the GTX 680. You can see it's a slightly shorter
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card, although it's more than slightly shorter, which I'll show you more of in a moment. Uses the same fan, which is
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good because the GTX 680 fan is excellent. It is a PCI Express 3.0 card,
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which is good if you have the latest IV Bridge platform for your system. You can
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see on the back we got sort of, you know, more like plasticky shroudy thing.
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There's our PCIe interface. I already showed you the two DVI HDMI and display
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port connectors. Up here we've got cool GeForce GTX branding. And then here
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we've got our two six pin PCIe connectors. And what you may have
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noticed about that is it's in kind of a weird location. Why would that be?
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Because the GTX 670 comes with a very
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short PCB. NVIDIA has actually rotated the GPU around to make better use of the
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power circuitry being on the uh the back
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half of the card. So all your power delivery is actually here instead of
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here. So they no longer needed that segment of the PCB. Check this out.
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There you go. So you can see this 670 is a reference 670 and there's actually
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extra room for more graphics memory. So you can buy a 670 with up to 4 gigs of
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graphics memory. And where all that power delivery circuitry normally is,
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it's no longer there. So, they are still using the nice long efficient blower
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cooler, which is going to exhaust most of the air out the back of your case. And you can also see there's a nice big
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gap between the heat sink and these uh these vents back here, which actually
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allows for slightly better air flow. But
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they've used a very very efficient design to achieve that. Speaking of
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efficiency, it is um by far better
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performance per watt than anything else that NVIDIA has produced in this kind of
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a price range before. So, it's uh like I said using the same GPU as the GTX 680,
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which means it just blows away its predecessors, the 570, the 470 in terms
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of the performance per watt that this card can deliver. It is compatible with
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multi-way SLI configurations due to its two SLI uh its two SLI bridge.
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two SLI connectors. Sorry guys, I'm tired. And I think that pretty much
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covers it. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the
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GeForce GTX 570 from Galaxy. And don't forget to subscribe to Lest Tech Tips
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