GeForce GTX 670 review - Introduction

GeForce GTX 680, GeForce GTX 690, what's missing... oh heck yeah, it's the GeForce GTX 670! NVIDIA's GK04 based graphics cards are going and selling well. The actual amount/volume available of these graphics cards could increase a little sure, but overall these products have been received quite well in the market.

Last week we've moved from expensive, to very expensive with the GeForce GTX 690 and today's tested product is priced a little better for the majority of us. How does 399 USD sound? It probably is the graphics card a lot of you have been waiting IF the performance would be right. And we can already tell you, you will not be disappointed.

Yes the GeForce GTX 670 is here, the little brother of the GTX 680 which comes well how to put it mildly... slightly castrated. NVIDIA disabled one out of eight shader processor clusters and designed a more cost effective (and much 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.

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.

To give the card enough framebuffer to work with the cards are equipped with 2048 GDDR5 on a 256-bit wide bus. Quick inspection however learns us that the PCB can be equiped 4GB just as well. With a TDP at roughly 170 Watts the card won't draw too much power either. The GeForce GTX 670 launch price is set at $399.

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.