NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Review Feat. EVGA: Bringing GK104 Down To $400
by Ryan Smith on May 10, 2012 9:00 AM ESTOC: Power, Temperature, & Noise
Our final task is our look at GTX 670’s overclocking capabilities. Based on what we’ve seen thus far with GTX 670, it looks like NVIDIA is binning chips based on functional units rather than clockspeeds. As a result GTX 670 could have quite a bit of overclocking potential, albeit one still limited by the lack of voltage control.
| GeForce 600 Series Overclocking | |||||
| GTX 670 | EVGA GTX 670SC | GTX 680 | |||
| Shipping Core Clock | 915MHz | 967MHz | 1006MHz | ||
| Shipping Max Boost Clock | 1084MHz | 1188MHz | 1110MHz | ||
| Shipping Memory Clock | 6GHz | 6GHz | 6GHz | ||
| Shipping Max Boost Voltage | 1.175v | 1.162v | 1.175v | ||
| Overclock Core Clock | 1065MHz | 1042MHz | 1106MHz | ||
| Overclock Max Boost Clock | 1234MHz | 1263MHz | 1210MHz | ||
| Overclock Memory Clock | 6.9GHz | 6.6GHz | 6.5GHz | ||
| Overclock Max Boost Voltage | 1.175v | 1.162v | 1.175v | ||
Because of the wider gap between base clock and boost clock on the GTX 670 we see that it doesn’t overclock quite as far as GTX 680 from a base clock perspective, but from the perspective of the maximum boost clock we’ve slightly exceeded the GTX 680. Depending on where a game lands against NVIDIA’s power targets this can either mean that an overclocked GTX 670 is faster or slower than an overclocked GTX 680, but at the same time it means that overclocking potential is clearly there.
We’re also seeing another strong memory overclock out of a GK104 card here. GTX 680 only hit 6.5GHz while GTX 690 could hit 7GHz. GTX 670 is only a bit weaker at 6.9GHz, indicating that even with the relatively small PCB that NVIDIA can still exceed the high memory clocks they were shooting for. At the same time however this is a luck of the draw matter.
The EVGA card meanwhile fares both worse and better. Its gap between the base clock and and maximum boost clock is even larger than the reference GTX 670, leading to it having an even lower overclocked base clock but a higher overclocked maximum boost clock. The real limiting factor however is that it couldn’t reach a memory overclock quite as high as the reference GTX 670 – again, luck of the draw – which means it can’t match the overclocked reference GTX 670 as it’s going to be more memory bandwidth starved more often.
Moving on to our performance charts, we’re going to once again start with power, temperature, and noise, before moving on to gaming performance. We’ll be testing our GTX 670 cards at both stock clocks with the maximum power target of 122% (170W) to showcase what is possible at validated clockspeeds with a higher power cap, and a true overclock with a maximum power target along with the largest clock offsets we can achieve.
Not surprisingly, since we’re almost always operating within the realm of the power target as opposed to the TDP on the GTX 600 series, our power consumption closely follows our chosen power target. Cranking up the power target on the GTX 670 for example to 170W puts us within 6W of the GTX 680, which itself had a 170W power target in the first place. This is true for both Metro and OCCT, which means power consumption is very predictable when doing any kind of overclocking.
This also means that power consumption is still 18W-30W below the 7970, which in turn means that if these overclocks can close the performance gap, then the GTX 670 still has a power consumption advantage.
As to be expected, with an increase in power consumption comes an increase in load temperatures. However the fact that we’re only able to increase power consumption by about 30W means the temperature rise is limited to 4-5C, pushing temperatures into the low 80s. This does end up being warmer than the equivalent GTX 680 however due to the 680’s superior heatsink.
Finally, when it comes to noise we’re also seeing the expected increase, but again it’s rather small. Under Metro the amount of noise from the reference GTX 670 rises by under 3dB when pushing the power target higher on its own, while it rises 3dB when adding in our full overclock. Again the smaller cooler means that the GTX 670’s fan has to work harder here, which means our gaming performance may be able to reach the GTX 680, but our noise is going to slightly exceed it. As a point of reference, in the process we’ll also exceed the GTX 580’s noise levels under Metro. Still, in both OCCT and Metro none of our GTX 670 cards exceed the Radeon HD 7900 series, which means we've managed to increase our performance relative to those cards without breaching the level of noise they generate in the first place.
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SlyNine - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - link
lol twist the words any way you want. They will never mean what you want them to mean.The 7970 came out at 570$ and I didn't think it was a bad value. But at the same time its no 2900XT or 5800ultra.
Right now I do feel Nvidia offers a better value. But their are situations, in very high resolutions and on certain games that AMD performs better. Why you cannot see that Nvidia isn't total domination is beyond me.
SlyNine - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - link
lol twist the words any way you want. They will never mean what you want them to mean.The 7970 came out at 570$ and I didn't think it was a *good* value. But at the same time its no 2900XT or 5800ultra.
Right now I do feel Nvidia offers a better value. But their are situations, in very high resolutions and on certain games that AMD performs better. Why you cannot see that Nvidia isn't total domination is beyond me.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
You are correct I did twist them, on purpose.Thanks for actually noticing. Note also I didn't twist like that in my other posts.
ROFL - your welcome.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - link
PS- even though twisted, my point is still 100% valid, and negates the whole pile from chizow, so it means exactly what I said it meant, but putting two and two together is not your strong suit.You went from 5870, skipped the crappy 6970 generation, die shrink, core jump, because it sucked.
You also passed over the overpriced amd 7970.
chizow whines a lot, but you proved him wrong, and used the method I outlined and said most would do and most owning cards have done, not his stupid retentive one upgrade path only dumb as heck complaint.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
Dude, just sell the 560 and get the 670 - you can stop the cheetos binging and 2x2liter nighttime soda guzzling to make up the difference. Ebay is your friend.eddman - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
And what's that supposed to prove? There are many games that use HBAO and FXAA, does it mean they are all botched?Disable them both and run the benchmarks. The difference would be none.
Take unreal 3 for example. Let's say it favors nvidia. If so, then how come bulletstorm runs better on 7970?
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 10, 2012 - link
With nVidia card you can just use the upcoming automatic game settings - another gigantic nVidia driver advantage over amd's crap.It's getting far too embarrassing to support amd's crap anymore - there are now numerous absolute fails on amd's part.
It was bad enough when amd didn't pay for PhysX, failed to have openCL in the drivers, had 3 features unchecked in gpu-z that nvidia had covered, failed in DX11 tessellation, was still plagued by the all in wonder corner mouse cursor bug from win98, had no ambient occlusion, cannot support cards going back to the equivalent of nVidia 8 series - but now they're so hammered by so many nVidia advantages beyond all those issues it is embarrassing to the point of humiliating.
No adaptive v-sync now enabled all the way back for nVidia 8 series
No frame rate target
No on the fly power saving adaptive OC.
No 4th monitor for surfing next to the surround eyefinity triples
No driver present taskbar centering for triple monitor (addon amd)
No sneak peek bezel driver support
---
I'll stop because the list is so enormous now - and amd cannot even get working CF drivers going yet for half the games, while nVidia releases with SLI mastery.
NVidia is in a superior position across the board - price, performance, power, drivers, added features, extra features, game day driver releases, and soon a driver optimizer (June ) that they make with their GPU server farms - actually pumping out the work for the gamer - something the embarrassed amd I guess is entirely absent on - while they fire more and more employees - making any sane person clearly see why the drivers that were already suffering are now even worse.
AMD needs to be about half the price of nVidia hardware.
anubis44 - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
...except that nvidia can't seem to make more than a few dozen at a time.It's pathetic that they're pricing the only two GTX600-series cards to undercut AMD, yet they can't seem to build them. Pretty clever marketing gimmick. You price cards so they undercut the competition, and everybody salivates at the prospect of buying one and decides not to buy the AMD card... except they're not really available. Pretty cheap ploy from one of the most hated companies in the business.
I'd be surprised if half of nvidia's board partners didn't go out of business or jump ship to AMD after this supply fiasco.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
This is the 3rd gtx600 series cards, but expecting you to be correct is worse than betting on the broken watch.GTX680 at newegg has outsold the entire amd 7870 and 7850 line up.
Maybe your bean counting should be directed to the corporate pig loser amd ?
At least with nVidia the partners can unload a million backorders when the supply irons out, and 2.5 months after release amd's finally ironed out... it was pathetic until then, so the very thing you spew about partners bailing already happened to amd right ? I mean let's keep your insane spewing consistent across the competition, why not that would be fair..
Congratulations on being so incapable of making a point.
nVidia's partners are counting the backorders and cannot count that high, now they have the even more impressive and winning GTX670 to unload - destroying amd's entire top line.
What were you saying about nVidia partners ? Did your "unconscious" amd inner fanboy totally go bonkers and into insane projection mode ?
It's amd partners that are in trouble now.
LOL
medi01 - Friday, May 11, 2012 - link
Do you get payed for nVidia for posting crap like that or do you work at nVidia?So much idiotic hate towards a company that wasn't cought doing half of the shit, that nVidia did.