ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II TOP review - Introduction

Welcome to another GeForce GTX 670 review, in this article we'll look at a really nice offering from ASUS, a factory overclocked, custom cooled, custom designed PCB GeForce GTX 670, yes it is the DirectCUII TOP edition alright.

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 remains very 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 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 (I'm talking about the reference clocks here).

NVIDIA's board partners are however allowed to create their own designs with their own preferred clock frequencies, and that changes the ballgame as todays product for example is as fast as a GeForce GTX 680.

The DirectCU II TOP editions come factory overclocked pretty intensely towards 1058 MHz on the GPU base clock and a whopping 1137 MHz on the boost frequency. The memory clock remains standard at 6008 MHz btw.

With a slightly higher TDP at roughly 170~180 Watts the card won't draw too much power either. But hey now, with all that said and done 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.