EVGA GeForce GTX 670 SC review - Introduction

The GeForce GTX 670 review galore has started. In this review we'll look at a board from EVGA, it is the SC model that comes  factory overclocked (a little). The GeForce GTX 670 is the little brother of the GTX 680 and comes well how to put it ... slightly castrated. NVIDIA disabled a couple of shader processors and designed a more cost effective and smaller PCB.

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 as well comes with a Boost clock which is set at 980 MHz -- not far off from the GTX 680 at all.

EVGA released a series of SKUs based on the GTX 670, amongst them you'll find these:

• EVGA GeForce GTX 670 2GB: $399.99
• EVGA GeForce GTX 670 2GB Superclocked: $419.99
• EVGA GeForce GTX 670 4GB: $469.99
• EVGA GeForce GTX 670 4GB Superclocked: $489.99

We have the 2GB SC edition in the house which comes pre-overclocked at 967 MHz on the baseclock and 1046 MHz on the boost clock. More interestingly. To give the card enough frame buffer to work with the cards are equipped with 2048 GDDR5 on a 256-bits wide bus. EVGA clocks this memory at 6210 MHz (effective data rate), which is slightly overclocked as well. As you have noticed 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.

With a TDP at roughly 170 Watts the card won't draw too much power either. 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.