GeForce GTX 670 2 GB Review: Is It Already Time To Forget GTX 680?

[baracubra]

Ughhhh, i dunno if its just just me, but whats the "v-word?"

 

[benkraft]

[citation][nom]Baracubra[/nom]Ughhhh, i dunno if its just just me, but whats the "v-word?"[/citation]
v-v-v-v-vaaaaalue, my friend.

 

[internetlad]

I think it might be time to retire my 4870 and pick one of these bad boys up.

 

[ojas]

I'm just wondering. When the TH German team posted Benchmarking AMD's 768-Shader Pitcairn: Not For Public Consumption a few days ago, the 680 and 7970 were trading blows. This review shows that the 670 mostly outperforms the 7970.

What gives? I'm not a conspiracy nut, but i sincerely think that the German benchmark suite was more fair, or at least it appeared to be. Maybe that was because those were "performance" settings and this suite puts more importance on visual quality?

Just curious :O

---------------

Other than that, card looks great, but wtf Nvidia's suggesting a price of INR 30k ($560) for this card in India. Crazy fools.

And it's a shame that both companies haven't touched the $200 price bracket yet. If nothing comes by June i'll probably go for the 560, then jump to the 760 or HD8870.

AMD needs to step up its game, and Nvidia need to increase their supply...sad scene.

 

[Guest]

Looking at prices here in the UK, I simply cannot now think of any other card than the 670 to upgrade from my hd5850.

was going to go 7870, but at £260+ its way too expensive for performance, The 7970 is also way too expensive now, when in stock at OCuK I can get a 670 for £320.00. No competition here folks!

 

[sarinaide]

Is it just me or do the goal posts move all the time. I see different numbers everytime I see a benchmark.

If it was 10% faster than a HD 7970 then it would be faster than a GTX 680, I really don't do the puffing well.

 

[jay2tall]

$400. I have a few friends who may be itching to run with this. The 680 should have been back in stock by now. Nvidia really lost out on that. With the 670 at $400 thought, a lot of people will go for this and save a Benjamin.

 

[fomoz]

Can you please do a GTX 670 4GB 4-way SLI review at 7680x1440?

 

[CaedenV]

Holy freaking cow! I was expecting a price war... but this is going to be absolutely nuts lol. How many early adopters are kicking themselves now that they purchased a $550 card a month ago that will soon only be worth ~$400. Even if the 670 is in short supply, they 7970 will still be forced into a price drop because most gamers are willing to wait a little bit for supply for this kind of price difference. Absolutely amazing.

Also, I am really stoked about the size of the PCB. Throw a short aftermarket cooler on here and pair it with an itx IB mobo and you have the makings of an absolutely killer shuttle PC... the world of portable game rigs could see a huge revival from this... if there are any good LAN games to bring the interest back to LAN gaming instead of just doing things via the net.

So... If AMD cannot compete with CPUs, and they are getting price gouged on GPUs... what is going to be their next cash cow to keep things moving? I mean the entire company has been floating on GPU profits... so what is next?

 

[vitornob]

I read somewhere that this card use so much cost effective parts that it could be priced as a 250 dollars VGA.
This clearly refers to this card meant to be a Hunter card (GK104) and not a tanker card (GK100).

I'm just sad that AMD doesn't raised the bar THAT much.. Nvidia got a hunter as a tanker. And sadly we paying for it. (Paying both to AMD and NVidia)

 

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]ojas[/nom]Crazy fools.And it's a shame that both companies haven't touched the $200 price bracket yet. If nothing comes by June i'll probably go for the 560, then jump to the 760 or HD8870.AMD needs to step up its game, and Nvidia need to increase their supply...sad scene.[/citation]
The cheap cards will not come out until stock of the last gen cards depleats. So the sooner people buy them up the sooner we will get affordable game GPUs... that finally do not require a power supply connection

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]fomoz[/nom]Can you please do a GTX 670 4GB 4-way SLI review at 7680x1440?[/citation]
No, GTX 670 doesn't support four-way SLI.

 

[sarinaide]

[citation][nom]sayantan[/nom]Nice move nV , forcing AMD to drop their prices for entire lineup. A 7970 at $400 would be really awesome...[/citation]

Thats rather naive, at the time when the 7970 was out the GTX 580 was the alpha card to beat and it cost $550, The HD 7970 smoked it in every regard, AMD had entitlement to putting the rate that high as it was the better card. Now with the Kepler out AMD are reacting in price drops while the aptly aging 580 is still overpriced. Consider that the AMD HD7900 GHZ edition cards are coming out, that will redress the balance prior to the HD 8000 release.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]ojas[/nom]I'm just wondering. When the TH German team posted Benchmarking AMD's 768-Shader Pitcairn: Not For Public Consumption a few days ago, the 680 and 7970 were trading blows. This review shows that the 670 mostly outperforms the 7970.What gives? I'm not a conspiracy nut, but i sincerely think that the German benchmark suite was more fair, or at least it appeared to be. Maybe that was because those were "performance" settings and this suite puts more importance on visual quality?Just curious ---------------Other than that, card looks great, but wtf Nvidia's suggesting a price of INR 30k ($560) for this card in India. Crazy fools.And it's a shame that both companies haven't touched the $200 price bracket yet. If nothing comes by June i'll probably go for the 560, then jump to the 760 or HD8870.AMD needs to step up its game, and Nvidia need to increase their supply...sad scene.[/citation]
Please feel free to suggest games you'd like to see added! I've been running this collection of what I consider to be pretty-popular titles, but am always happy to add more, time permitting. Getting this piece finished in time was hard enough after the requests to re-run all of the cards using the latest drivers in the GTX 690 story, but we did what we could to address that one.
As mentioned, though, the German team does use a different suite on the charts with a more spread-out emphasis that includes older titles, too.

 

[Onus]

With the crippling of compute performance, please include a metric like Bitcoin mining. Subtracting the cost of power, this card is probably beaten silly by a HD6770.
Ok, bring on the thumbs-down; this card won't be on my shopping list.

 

[sarinaide]

[citation][nom]vitornob[/nom]I read somewhere that this card use so much cost effective parts that it could be priced as a 250 dollars VGA.This clearly refers to this card meant to be a Hunter card (GK104) and not a tanker card (GK100).I'm just sad that AMD doesn't raised the bar THAT much.. Nvidia got a hunter as a tanker. And sadly we paying for it. (Paying both to AMD and NVidia)[/citation]

What bar are you refering to, you do realise the HD7000 was the replacement to the HD 6000 series, and it is a huge improvement on that, the 7970 also handsomely dethroned the GTX 580 in every regard, it is now 7 months old and you expect it to miraculously compete with a new card? I don't know where you find your expectations from, clearly another AMD hater.

 

[rohitbaran]

Of course, an attractive price is only one variable in the equation that determines whether you want to buy something or not. Performance is another, as is availability (a more problematic factor for Nvidia as of late).

Add availability to the factors too lol!

 

[Soulmachiklamo]

Nvidia really did a nice job on this card, but for some reason this makes me sad...
As I was about to buy a 680GTX to have the most powerful single gpu card on the planet (at least for a while) but now with this 670GTX I'm doubting like hell.... But I want my 680 so badly?

 

[jeffredo]

For the love of God please release the GTX 660. My old X4 980 would bottleneck a GTX 670 too much.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]rohitbaran[/nom]Add availability to the factors too lol![/citation]
I did...it's actually, er, in the text you quoted?

 

[geekapproved]

Paper launch. They will be available for a short time and then out of stock like all of Nividia's other paper launch products.

 

[lilcinw]

I would love to see a pair of these (or 680s) in the next SBM series. Unfortunately I don't think the availability will allow it unless newegg will reserve some specifically for Tom's.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]bardacuda[/nom]Good review! Noticed a couple of confusing things though...not sure if it's the graphs that are wrong or the interpretations:That chart shows it being between stock 670 and 680 in a couple applications, and ahead of the 680 in most.Then from the DiRT 3 charts:The charts clearly show the 670 winning at all 3 resolutions.[/citation]
Thanks for the catches! Fixed both references. In the first, I must have been looking at another Excel sheet while I was writing. On the other, I swapped my labels around on myself. The joys of frenzied benchmarking -> writing -> Excel work

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]CaedenV[/nom]Holy freaking cow! I was expecting a price war... but this is going to be absolutely nuts lol. How many early adopters are kicking themselves now that they purchased a $550 card a month ago that will soon only be worth ~$400. Even if the 670 is in short supply, they 7970 will still be forced into a price drop because most gamers are willing to wait a little bit for supply for this kind of price difference. Absolutely amazing.Also, I am really stoked about the size of the PCB. Throw a short aftermarket cooler on here and pair it with an itx IB mobo and you have the makings of an absolutely killer shuttle PC... the world of portable game rigs could see a huge revival from this... if there are any good LAN games to bring the interest back to LAN gaming instead of just doing things via the net.So... If AMD cannot compete with CPUs, and they are getting price gouged on GPUs... what is going to be their next cash cow to keep things moving? I mean the entire company has been floating on GPU profits... so what is next?[/citation]
FWIW, I asked if any partners planned to take advantage of the shorter PCB to make a small form-factor or single-slot card, and the answer was no; it'd require too much cooling still. We need to wait for something lower-power from Nvidia for that, like AMD's Radeon HD 7770 or 7750.

 

[RADIO_ACTIVE]

Now if we could get some games to push the hardware lol