NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 review round-up

NVIDIA revealed its latest GPU today, and even if the GeForce GTX 670 isn’t technically the greatest (that honor goes to its dual-GPU big brother the 690) reviews across the board are generally positive. The reference card should put prices in the $400 range, about a hundred bucks less than the GTX 680 and considerably more justifiable for the PC gamer on a budget. Take a look at the opinions of the major gaming and hardware resources after the break. AnandTech is one of the most trusted resources around when it comes to nitty-gritty high-end testing, and the reviewers came away impressed. Comparing the GTX 670 with its AMD rival the Radeon 7970, the NVIDIA card managed comparable gaming performance at a price of $60-80 less. “NVIDIA can’t quite beat the 7950 in every game (e.g. Crysis), but when it loses it’s close, and when it wins it’s 15%, 25%, even 50% faster… as it stands the worst case scenario for the GTX 670 is that it performs like a 7950 while the best case scenario is that it performs like a 7970.” While acknowledging that the GTX 670 beats out AMD’s competing models, Extreme Tech noted that the distinction isn’t all that dramatic, and that the availability shortage with the GTX 680 may rear its head again. “As far as direct competition with AMD is concerned, Kepler puts Nvidia back in the driver’s seat when it comes to defining performance at a given price point. The good news, for both consumers and AMD, is that the comparison isn’t nearly as one-sided as we’ve sometimes seen in previous generations.” Tom’s Hardware was bullish on both the Kepler board itself, and its price when compared with current and past NVIDIA models. “[The] GeForce GTX 670 is a phenomenal little board that blows right past the GeForce GTX 580—a card that was introduced at $500 a year and a half ago.” Tom’s Hardware was still skeptical on retail availability after trouble finding GTX 680 and 690 units in the real world. The folks at HardOCP are all about the overclock, and found the GTX 670 surprisingly compliant in this area. “We were shocked when we were able to take the video card all the way to 1254MHz, though only for about ten minutes. Moving to a fully stable overclock we settled on 1234MHz. This is a tremendous overclock that positively helped performance over 10% generally.” They also noted that the GTX 670 outperformed the Radeon HD 7950 in nearly every test. Hot Hardware echoed Tom’s in their praise of the card and their concerns over availability. “The card offers all of the features of the higher-end GeForce GTX 680 and 90+% of the performance, but at a lower price. Hopefully NVIDIA’s availability issues are rectified soon, because we suspect many of you are going to want to score on of these puppies.” Over at PC World, the price to power ratio when compared with older NVIDIA cards and current offerings from AMD was praised. “At $100 less, you still get performance better than last year’s high end GPU from Nvidia, and equaling more expensive cards based on AMD’s Radeon HD 7970.” Adding in some thoughts for those of us without hulking gamer-class enclosures, TechSpot applauded the size and power draw of the GTX 670. “…it was only 6% slower than the GTX 680 while being 20% cheaper — awesome news for value-minded enthusiasts who still want top-end performance. Raw speed aside, we were also impressed by the GTX 670′s diminutive footprint as its PCB is no bigger than an HD 7750′s, making it the smallest high-end graphics card we’ve seen.” The experts have spoken: The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 is a great deal at the $400 price point, with performance that beats last year’s NVIDIA flagship model and bests AMD’s comparable offerings in most situations. It’s also noticeable smaller, quieter and easier on electricity than previous GPUs thanks to the Kepler architecture. The only concern that most have is the retail availability of the new card, as GTX 680 and GTX 690 cards are still very hard to find.