MSI GeForce GTX 670 Power edition /OC review - Introduction

Today we look at another GeForce GTX 670. In this review we'll look at a board from MSI, it is the Power edition model that comes factory overclocked and it armed with the all new TwinFrozr IV cooler. The GeForce GTX 670 is the little brother of the GTX 680 and comes, well how to put it ... slightly castrated as NVIDIA disabled a couple of shader processors.

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

MSI released two SKUs based on the GTX 670:

• MSI GeForce GTX 670 2GB: $399.99
• MSI GeForce GTX 670 2GB Power edition: $419.99
• MSI GeForce GTX 670 2GB Power edition/OC: $419.99

We have the 2GB Power Edition in house which comes pre-overclocked at 1020 MHz on the baseclock and 1089 MHz  (misprinted in the chart below) on the boost clock. To give the card enough frame buffer to work with the cards are equipped with 2048 GDDR5 on a 256-bits wide bus.

MSI clocks this memory reference at 6008MHz (effective data rate). As you will notice while looking at the PCB (later on in the article) we think 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.

The power edition however brings all the goodness that is the GeForce GTX 670, a very powerful card. Armed with the new Twin Frozr IV cooler it runs cool and silent as well. The new dual 8cm PWM fan based cooler comes with Dust removal technology, basically when you startup the PC the fans will rotate backwards for 30 seconds clearing dust from the cooling solution. To top it off, MSI applied their Military Class III component usage making sure that only the best is used on the graphics card.

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.